Marginal Revolution published a brief note on a subsection from Georgi Gospodinov's novel Time Shelter, centered on an imagined late-life return by Odysseus after his homecoming.

The passage is titled "The Shortest Novel About Odysseus After His Return Home." In it, Odysseus is described as old, weakened, and beginning to forget. One night, tired of everything, he secretly leaves home and tries to set out once more for the places, women, and wonders he had encountered earlier in life. The attempted journey is framed as a return into his fading memory, an effort to revisit both what had happened and who he had once been.

The note emphasizes the irony that, in old age, Odysseus begins to become "Nobody," the name he once used as a clever deception when introducing himself to the Cyclops in Homer's Odyssey. By evening, Telemachus finds him collapsed beside the boat, only a hundred yards from home, unable to explain what he is doing there or where he had intended to go. He is then taken back to a house with a woman he no longer remembers.

The novel discussed is Time Shelter, originally written in Bulgarian and translated into English by Angela Rodel. It was awarded the International Booker Prize in 2023, making Gospodinov the first Bulgarian author to receive the prize. Its premise is that refuges are created for people with Alzheimer's disease, with each refuge recreating life from earlier decades, such as the 1960s. The concept changes when people from the present also begin wanting to live in those recreated pasts, and the novel expands into a broader meditation on collective nostalgia and Europe's turbulent twentieth century.

Source: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/odysseus-notes.html