The Little Book
Registered by 
over-the-moon
of Lausanne, Vaud Switzerland on 6/6/2009
This Book is Currently in the Wild!
over-the-moon of Lausanne, Vaud Switzerland on 6/6/2009 This Book is Currently in the Wild!
1 journaler for this copy...
airport book (forgot my other book in my luggage so I had to buy something to entertain me during my three-hour wait between flights).
Have read about half, it is about time travel, Vienna, and baseball (rather a lot about baseball and I don't understand any of it). Quite entertaining so far, but I wish there were not so many mistakes in the German.
Have read about half, it is about time travel, Vienna, and baseball (rather a lot about baseball and I don't understand any of it). Quite entertaining so far, but I wish there were not so many mistakes in the German.
Time travel books have always been a fascination, they tease my mind, and I love them as long as the improbable seems perfectly plausible.
Here the American hero Wheeler, baseball player and musician (a fan of Buddy Holly) is shot on his doorstep and finds himself in turn-of-the-century Vienna where he meets not only Mark Twain, Gustav Mahler, Sigmund Freud and various members of the Jung Wien set, but also his grandfather, his favourite university professor, his grandmother, all in their own normal lifetimes, and another time-traveller, his father Dilly, a Resistance hero who died aged 44 when Wheeler was 3 and is coincidentally sent back to the same place and time as his son despite the 40-year gap in their deaths. The story is related by Wheeler's mother (i.e. wife of Dilly) who gathers the facts from an old book. There is a lot about baseball, frisbees, psychology, music, unliberated women and repressed sentiments, Jewish life, and a quest to strangle the child Hitler. Oh, and I forgot an encounter with Empress Elisabeth.
Reading this felt like unravelling an old and matted knitted sweater; sometimes the threads were tangled and had to be teased out very carefully, there were some knots that were very difficult to unpick, sometimes they stretched until they almost snapped, but in the end they all wound up nicely into a ball. Though a totally implausible one.
Here the American hero Wheeler, baseball player and musician (a fan of Buddy Holly) is shot on his doorstep and finds himself in turn-of-the-century Vienna where he meets not only Mark Twain, Gustav Mahler, Sigmund Freud and various members of the Jung Wien set, but also his grandfather, his favourite university professor, his grandmother, all in their own normal lifetimes, and another time-traveller, his father Dilly, a Resistance hero who died aged 44 when Wheeler was 3 and is coincidentally sent back to the same place and time as his son despite the 40-year gap in their deaths. The story is related by Wheeler's mother (i.e. wife of Dilly) who gathers the facts from an old book. There is a lot about baseball, frisbees, psychology, music, unliberated women and repressed sentiments, Jewish life, and a quest to strangle the child Hitler. Oh, and I forgot an encounter with Empress Elisabeth.
Reading this felt like unravelling an old and matted knitted sweater; sometimes the threads were tangled and had to be teased out very carefully, there were some knots that were very difficult to unpick, sometimes they stretched until they almost snapped, but in the end they all wound up nicely into a ball. Though a totally implausible one.
time for this to take a trip
