The Lost Time Accidents

by John Wray

The Lost Time Accidents is a bold and epic saga set against the greatest upheavals of the twentieth century. Haunted by a failed love affair and the darkest of family secrets, Waldemar 'Waldy' Tolliver wakes one morning to discover that he has been exiled from the flow of time. The world continues to turn, and Waldy is desperate to find his way back. In his ambitious and fiercely inventive new novel, John Wray takes us from turn-of-the-century Viennese salons buzzing with rumours about Einstein's radical new theory to the death camps of the Second World War, from the golden age of post-war pulp science fiction to a startling discovery in a modern-day Manhattan apartment packed to the ceiling with artefacts of contemporary life.

Genres: Fiction, Science Fiction, Time Travel, Historical Fiction, Fantasy, Mystery, Science Fiction Fantasy

512 pages, Paperback

First published February 9, 2016

About the author

John Wray is the author of five critically acclaimed novels, Godsend, The Lost Time Accidents, Lowboy, The Right Hand of Sleep and Canaan's Tongue. He was named one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists in 2007. The recipient of a Whiting Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, he lives in Brooklyn and Mexico City.

Reviews

[Amy McLay Paterson · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am so relieved to be done with this book.

If I told you that the problem with this story is an unbelievable central premise, you'd likely assume I was referring to the myriad time travel machinations. Not so. I'm a sucker for a time travel plot, and while not perfect, there was a studied, if slightly over-complicated mystery to this one, that could have flourished under different circumstances. However, more than a time travel story, this book is at heart a Chosen One narrative, and in the opinion of this reader, a Chosen One story will sink or swim on the shoulders of s/he who is chosen.

And Waldemar Tolliver sinks this book. For most of the narrative, the entirety of his personality is shorthanded through casual sexism, archaic turns of phrase, and daddy issues. Admittedly from page 300 onwards, I was only half paying attention, but if he somehow became compelling in the book's 11th hour, I can safely decree: too little, too late.

I would guess that mine will end up a minority opinion, because Wray is relying on his imagined (male) readership to fill out Waldemar's characterization through self-projection. Wray's ideal reader is a man who indulges equally in self-deprecation and delusions of grandeur, and I dare say he'll find enough. Personally, I'd stick this book on Rebecca Solnit's proposed list of "50 books no woman should read." Female characters are relegated to catalysts or crones.

There is one interesting thread buried in this mess of a book (which was why it took me so long to realize I was ultimately sick of it): the character of the narrator's grandfather Kaspar (tellingly not a Chosen One) and his wife Sonja kept me intrigued up until their pre-WWII flight from Austria. Kaspar is (not coincidentally) the most well-developed character and the only male character I would have enjoyed spending more time with. Sonja too gave glimpses of intrigue, but like the other women in this book, stayed a vague sketch and a prize and a catalyst.

[Ioana · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Lost Time Accidents is not a flawless epic masterpiece (say, Bolano's 2666 ), but it is an incredibly creative, penetrating, fun, well-written, thought-provoking 3-generational saga that defies genres or synopsis.

I didn't love this (4/5), and the execution didn't always work terribly well (4/5), but, I'm going with 5 for Wray's sheer originality and ingenuity. Because what this book manages to do is somehow weave together questions about historical memory (i.e. how do we atone for the sins of our forbears? how are psychoses, beliefs, passions passed down through generations?), a challenge to Einstein's theory of relativity (!! synchronicity), a mind-bending structure that spirals inwards in time, a century's worth of events, and an intelligent, ingenious exploration of the ethics of science and of the nature of time.

Above all, The Time Accidents is a story about time in all its dimensions: physical, experiential, historical, psychological, poetical, mathematical, etc. And who doesn't love/isn't intrigued/vexed/lost/beholden to/perplexed in/by time?!?!

Time, the supposed 4th dimension, only moves in one direction (as we experience it). But, mathematically, if it is just another dimension, it should be traversable, like space (also, in physics, time is just another coordinate in the spacetime fabric). Physically, we're always in seemingly the same time. Yet time can pass slower or faster, depending on how we're feeling/what we are doing (same in physics, it turns out: the "passing" of time is related to an object's movement through space). If you think about time as coordinates (x,y,z,t), and take an object that is first located at coordinate A, and then at B, then time begins to look a lot like movement, the coordinate that describes motion. What does this even mean? I have no clear idea - it's virtually impossible, really, to capture time, though many have tried, in all disciplines.

Then-what about dreams and memory? Memory can take us back in time. After all, isn't the world as we know it just our perception? And our memories are mental events, like anything else we process from experience. Is memory the ultimate time-travel? If so, what about historical memory? What about that which has been passed down through generations, what about concepts that have encrusted themselves with time that now seem "given", when in fact they are just artifacts of time and reenactment?

The Time Accidents is one of those books that won't give you an answer (a definite plus from my perspective), but rather lead you in a journey of questions-not only those explicitly asked in the story, but also those the reader is inspired to imagine on their own. For me, this translated into a crazed book-buying binge about things like octopuses (they are radial creatures after all - how do they experience space, and thus time, since spacetime is one and the same). And, into furiously printing out a slew of articles about stuff like "mathematical philosophy of time in Minkowskian space" (I'm a math geek, as all math teachers should be). Your inspiration could take many other forms, depending on your interests - there's the Nazi question, the question about how science intersects with ethics, the question of familial guilt and psychosis, the question about the nature of dreams and memory, you name it, Wray's got you covered.

The book is definitely an investment (of time, incidentally), a dense 500 pages. It's not perfect (for example, Wray's wittiness is at times self-conscious and somewhat awkward), but it's one of the most curiosity-inducing books I've ever read, and for that alone, I would HIGHLY recommend it!!

[switterbug (Betsey) · Rating 4 out of 5]

The cover illustration nails a nifty visual of Wray’s latest fiction--that time is not linear, but, rather, is rotary or circular, curved or spherical. Where did this come from, and why does it matter? It starts with Waldemar “Waldy” Tolliver, and the opening of this novel will likely go down as one of the greatest first lines of fiction:

“This morning, at 08:47 EST, I woke up to find myself excused from time.”

Well, whose curiosity wouldn’t be piqued? Its message is lean and straightforward, yet enigmatic. But, lest you think that this novel is lean and straightforward, think again! This is a fat, juicy, bulky, baggy, brainy, epic, and ginormous book, with Big Ideas and a sprawling cast.

The narrative is approached as a letter to a Mrs. Havens, the object of Waldy’s affections, and spans about 500 semi-dense pages and three generations. We are taken on a journey from Moravia, to Vienna, to NYC. Ottokar Toula, Waldy’s Czech great-grandfather, had alighted upon a theory of time, or a Time Accident, which he was about to prove to the world in 1903, when he was run over by a Daimler. He left a cryptic and seemingly nonsensical note of sorts, which Ottokar’s two sons try to decode. They become part of the fin de siècle Vienna when they move there to attend university and try to solve their father’s theory. Kaspar eventually seeks love and family matters, while Waldemar (Waldy’s great uncle) becomes more obsessive about the Lost Time Accidents.

What follows is a metaphysical romance, as well as a romance of metaphysics, reminding me sometimes of the mandala symbolism in GRAVITY’S RAINBOW, the obsessive traits of scholars in THE DOUBTER’S ALMANAC, the nature of time in Iain Pears’ ARCADIA, and the influence of Kabbalah and the Tarot on the unconscious mind. While reading, I felt the resonance of the “totality of being” and the abyss of complete nothingness, as well as the temporal relationships of Time and of the perception of time. As well as C*F*P*--Chance, Fate, and Providence.

Through all of Wray’s high-minded science and philosophy, he doesn’t forget the reader, and occasionally, the lowbrow humor. There’s Waldy’s father, Orson Tolliver, a celebrity writer of science fiction porn, with titles like “Salivation is Yours.” And, in ways that parallel STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND, Orson’s inflammatory notoriety as a “Prime Mover” in the “Church of Synchronology”—obviously a sardonic riff on the Church of Scientology. And, at the center of it is Waldy, an offbeat and oddball romantic who kept me fastened to the humanity of this story. We care, immediately, urgently, and continuously, about Waldy’s fate. His search for the Truth of Time is yet mirrored in the time of truth. And his adoration of Mrs. Havens is both his torch and his Sword of Damocles.

Wray bestows a very human look at our universal concerns of love, legacy, guilt, fear, identity, and morality. Not to mention a very serious, poignant, and tragic circumstance of evil experimentation by Waldy’s ancestor, who brutally tested his theories of the Lost Time Accidents on the Jews in death camps during WW II. I’m Jewish, and grew up haunted by the Holocaust, but this harrowing aspect of the novel would horrify anyone reading this book.

And then there is Waldy’s strained relationship with both parents, and his inscrutable, eccentric aunts who live in a virtual flea market of an apartment in Spanish Harlem. That’s the place where he is now, unable to get back in Time.

If sometimes the ambitious narrative seems out of control, it isn’t. The author has a design to all of it. I never got weary, until near the end, when I really, really, wanted a resolve, to reward my implacable loyalty to the bending, circular, spherical text. I needed an “orbituary!” (I even allowed for poetic license when the author casually mentions a head shop in the Ringstrasse. Heady shops, certainly, but no bongs for sale in the Ring!) I admit to a certain slight droop in my bearing at the finish line, which may have been inevitable, but felt a slight bit derivative or too facile. But, it may be that I wanted what those three generations of Toulas wanted. And what was that?

“…the notion that chronology is an illusion, if not a deliberate lie; that the steady, one-way current we seem to be suspended in is actually a jumble of spherical “chronocosms” that can be moved through in any direction, if some great force manages to knock one’s consciousness out of its preconditioned circuit—had grown progressively more elaborate, attaching itself to random scraps of knowledge in the course of its creator’s wandering, like a peach pit rolled across a dirty floor.”

Wray’s imagery soars on every page, with fresh feeling, “and the bubbling molasses of his prose,” so much so that I wanted to underline about 900 passages. I enjoyed the journey more than the destination, perhaps. So, if the finale didn’t exactly beat me to it-- well, as Chance, Fate, and Providence would have it, Time is on my side.

[Oriana · Rating 5 out of 5]

From Flavorwire's "50 Most Anticipated Books of 2016" list:

This big, multi-genre epic from the author of Lowboy and Canaan’s Tongue considers the damage wrought by the 20th century alongside questions about the nature of time. At more than 500 pages, it’s a gamble, but one that sounds like it could conjure the ghost of Alain Resnais’ Je t’aime je t’aime.

I loved the hell out of Lowboy and I am totes into big-ass doorstoppers these days soooo gimme gimme gimme.

[Cookie M. · Rating 1 out of 5]

Oh boy! A book about the meaning of everything.
Which turns out to be about nothing.
DNF.

I read enough of other people's reviews to gather that my opinion after 12% was on target, so I quit.

[Alan · Rating 2 out of 5]

1903 was an interesting year for temporal physics. In Geneva, an obscure patent clerk was already working on something he called "relativity" (though he was not to have his own "annus mirabilis" until 1905). And in Znojmo, Czechoslovakia, Ottokar Gottfriedens Toula may or may not have written down the secret of time travel, just moments before dying in front of an inattentive Viennese burgher's shiny new Daimler.

That kind of ignominiously thwarted potential might drive any surviving family members a little bit potty—and Ottokar Toula's children, grandchildren and even great-grandchildren all come to terms with his "Lost Time Accidents" in their own decidedly... idiosyncratic ways.

John Wray's novel The Lost Time Accidents begins lethargically, even claustrophobically. Waldemar Tolliver, Ottokar's thoroughly American great-grandson, has become trapped—"excused from time," as he puts it—in a tiny furnished nook deep within a warren of accumulated trash stuffed into the New York City townhouse where his dotty aunts Gentian and Enzian lived and died. (This setting is almost certainly modeled after the real-life abode of the Collyer brothers, two wealthy hoarders who perished in their Harlem brownstone in 1947, by the way. The New York Daily News has an unforgettable photo gallery online as well.)

Fortunately, Waldemar's narrative—if not Waldy himself—does swiftly emerge from its stifling cocoon to take in much more space, as well as time...


I found it odd how closely The Lost Time Accidents dovetailed with the book I read just before this one, The Russian Debutante's Handbook. Both books have more than a soupçon of Holocaust history stirred in, and as both narrators shuttled back and forth from New York City to Eastern Europe, I saw many reflections—or refractions, perhaps—of Gary Shteyngart's perspective. And sexism... this sentence, for example, alliteration and all, could've come straight from Shteyngart:

His sole source of solace was the waitress, a dumpling-cheeked Serb barely out of her teens, whose haunches shook like aspic as she crossed the gleaming floor.
—p.114

The Lost Time Accidents is certainly not without other flaws. It's hard to write about crackpottery at length without starting to sound a little cracked yourself, I think, and all too often Waldemar Tolliver's narrative descends into rather turgid meandering. But the story does resist circularity—it keeps moving forward, despite Waldy's oft-repeated purpose (repeated by others, anyway), to "close the loop" once and for all on the Lost Time Accidents.

And, occasionally, John Wray's novel is even fun. Pretend that you've just picked up this book yourself and turned at random to page 279... I'm going to quote that one page (all three paragraphs of it), which I think performs the parallel goals of perfectly demonstrating the most entertaining essence of The Lost Time Accidents while remaining free (I hope) of significant spoilers. This is Waldemar, analyzing his father Orson's unique way of coping with the Toula family's collective obsession by writing reams of pornographic science fiction (what the novel calls, derisively, "starporn"):

Countless critics have tried, in the three decades since, to account for the popularity The Excuse enjoyed in Aquarian-era America, in spite of its blundering plotline, its junior high symbolism, and a style that makes Arthur C. Clarke look like Arthur Miller. None have come anywhere close to succeeding, but all agree that the novel's last section, which is entirely taken up by Ozymandias's psychedelic vision of the future, must somehow be to blame. Such a degree of critical consensus (as any connoisseur of book reviews will tell you) is the rarest and most delicate of flowers; but in Orson's case the critics had their reasons. For one thing, the "Revelations" section—as it's come to be known—has a radically different tone than the rest of the book, as if the author were taking dictation; and for another thing, Mrs. Haven, a number of its predictions have come true.

In spite of their almost incidental presence in his novels—usually as hastily sketched backdrops to scenes of cybernetic debauchery—my father's prognostications of the not-too-distant future emerged, even during his lifetime, as the engine-in-chief of his fame. The time-travel allegation—the time-travel insinuation, better said—had been leveled against my family before, to explain the Timekeeper's disappearing act at Äschenwald; but the case against Orson Card Tolliver, especially since the invention of Global Positioning Systems and Viagra and the European Union (all of which he predicted) proved harder to sweep under the rug. The evidence, after all, is plain for anyone with a library card (or access to the World Wide Web—which Orson also saw coming) to judge for themselves. It changed my father from a figurative "cult novelist" into a literal one, an actor on the klieg-lit stage of history, no matter how furiously he lobbied to prevent it.

The orgy scene in "How to Make Machines and Influence Your Wife," for example, is tame by today's standards (six-dimensional dildo notwithstanding), and its prose won't win any Nebula Awards; the wireless earpiece, however, so casually deposited on a night table as the frolicking begins, is noteworthy in a story written in 1963. Personal infrared goggles were undreamed-of in 1959, but they're standard issue on "Planet Perinorium 13," and used to predictably lascivious ends. Orson had a rabid fantasy life, needless to say, and a commitment to reality negation possibly unsurpassed in human history, not to mention a lifetime subscription to Technology Today, but even I have a hard time explaining the appearance, 112 pages into Clocksuckers (1973), of a jihadist riding a Jet Ski.

Heh... I also rather liked this acerbic observation, not related to Orson's fiction:

"There's always room for one more religion in this country, sweetheart." He caught her by the waist. "That's why the devil made America so big."
—p.317

I picked up John Wray's novel on a whim, really—its lime-green spine was eye-catching, but I managed to pass it by more than once before succumbing to that lure. Once I had it in my hands, though, I stuck with it to the end. And, ultimately, I'm not sorry to have done so, if only because I was able to use The Lost Time Accidents to slow the passage of my own personal duration, for a little while, at least.

[Greg Zimmerman · Rating 4 out of 5]

(First appeared at http://www.thenewdorkreviewofbooks.co...)

Time isn't a straight arrow, nor is it a flat circle (sorry, McConaughey) — rather, the "chronosphere" is just that: a sphere we're all trapped in. But what if the sphere could be traversed, manipulated, emerged from? If the past is memories, the future is dreams, and the presents slowly recedes into the past only due to the passage of time, what if all it took to navigate within the chronosphere is the human mind, well trained? If this sounds like the stuff you and your buddies talked about at 3 am after getting high in your dorm room, that's nearly the exact effect of reading The Lost Time Accidents, John Wray's new crazy, smashingly smart novel. But this is also a really funny novel — stopping just short of zany, but often with one-liners and scenes worthy of more than just a snort.

There are three stories at once. A guy named Waldy Tolliver is writing his family's history. He's been "excused from time," meaning he's stuck at 8:47 EST in presumably near-present day. He doesn't know why or how, and neither do we. We just accept it.

The second story is the history Waldy is writing, and this is the meat of the novel — his great-grandfather, Ottokar Toula, living in a small town in Moravia at the turn of the 20th century discovers the secret to the universe — the Lost Time Accidents — but before he can tell anyone, he's hit by a car and dies. His two sons, one evil (Waldemar, for whom our stuck-in-time-biographer) is named, one good, Kaspar, both spend their lives in dramatically different ways trying to discover what their father had figured out. The story moves through the generations of the family, to Kaspar's son, Orson. Orson has a different relationship with family legacy, deciding to forgo physics to instead to write low-grade sci-fi. The ideas in one of his novels accidentally launches a Scientology-like cult called the United Church of Synchronology.

Finally, the third story is our narrator/biographer telling us the story about how he met a beautiful woman named Hildegard Haven at a party before he got stuck in time. He then proceeds to carry on a scandalous (Mrs. Haven is married after all), wild romance with her, leading up to his becoming stuck in time.

Naturally, all the stories converge (to a singularity?) and I was riveted in the second half of this novel to see how it'd all work out, to see if the various characters would truly solve the mystery of the Lost Time Accidents (if there actually is a definitive solution). From how to deal with the "grandmother paradox" (if you travel back in time and kill your grandmother, don't you cease to exist? But then how could you have traveled back in time to kill your grandmother? You don't exist!) to the "Patent Clerk" (Einstein, but the family hates him, because he just barely beat them to discovering relativity) and dozens of other head-trippy ideas in between, this is a novel that is a refreshing, inventive new take on the tried-and-true time-travel novel.

If you're a fan of David Mitchell's head-warping stories, you likely won't be disappointed here. Despite the length, and some sagging of interest in the first half, this is a terrific novel if you're in to stories that are more than just a bit out there.

[Drew · Rating 5 out of 5]

5+ out of 5.
One of the great joys of my reading year, actually: it's a perfectly constructed novel, one that rewards taking your time with it and allowing the size and scope to hit you as they will. It takes a moment to push through the barrier in the beginning, I'll admit - but once you're in, it's a delightful ride. Wray brings speculative influences together with real-world politics (both global and familial) and honest highbrow literature to create something that I think Kurt Vonnegut would've liked to read. In a time when we need writers who have a little twinkle in their eye and who are capable of delivering works that are complex without being confusing, deeply emotional without being manipulative, and easy-reading without being breezy, I'm glad we have someone like John Wray. I'd get lost in this book again without much of a qualm.

More at RB: http://ragingbiblioholism.com/2016/12...

[Rebecca · Rating 5 out of 5]

So Weird. SO GOOD. I was completely blown away. Wray's sense of humor is amazing and he pairs it with fantastic writing and dialogue and perfectly wacky theories about time. (If only Bats of the Republic had been so well-written.) The only caveat is this: you have to give this book about 50 pages before making a decision. Once you've gotten into the story, you can understand why Wray opens the book the way he does, but the beginning is a bit eye-roll-inducing until you get your bearings.

[Louise Wilson · Rating 3 out of 5]

What a hard slog I found this novel to be.

The storyline is narrated by the youngest member of the family.. It takes us back to Viennese salons buzzing with rumours about Einsteins theory and up to the death camps of World War Two.

I would like to thank Net Galley, Carrongate Books and the author John Wray for my ARC in exchange for an honest review.

[Josh]

DNF at 213. To this point the story is still waiting to enter into the time travel aspect which is what got me interested in the first place. More of a literary style than sci-fi, it had momentary passages of eloquent writing which kept me ever so slowly turning the page (small print) in hopes of some plot progression but alas the story just meanders on at a snails pace. I think the book, had I persevered would've eventually been worth the time investment but I'm just not invested enough to keep going.

[Deborah Klein · Rating 2 out of 5]

I started this book on a long flight thinking I would be stuck and would have hours to read. I just can't get into it. It is so boring and twee I fell asleep seven times. I'm moving on. In the preciousness, it reminded me of Jonathan Norell and Dr. Strange, another book I gave up on, albeit much further along.

[Rachael · Rating 2 out of 5]

Thank God this one is over. Probably deserves 3 stars for the writing alone but I just couldn't give them because the plot line was weird and all over the place and had me so utterly bored, and the ending was anticlimactic. Should have given up on this one, not sure why I finished it.

[Ash · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm a sucker for books that tackle weird metaphysical issues. This one is pretty clever: the main character, Walter, wakes up removed from time and starts writing a memoir. The book skips back and forth through time - he details his family history starting with his great grandfather, as well as his relationship with the mysterious Mrs. Haven, to whom the novel is written.

There was a lot going on here. His entire family is afflicted by the syndrome, that is, an obsession with the "Lost Time Accidents", a concept created by his great grandfather shortly prior to his death. His great uncle was a nazi who performed unspeakable acts in the name of science; his father wrote a book which inadvertantly started a cult. The way the stories intertwine reminds me a little of Stephenson, although this one didn't come together for me as well as Stephenson's books usually do.

Something like half of the book is written in the second person, letters Walter writes to Mrs. Haven. Sometimes second person doesn't work well in things like this - because we start the book after all of the action has taken place, Walter has to fill us in on everything that has happened to him. Practically, this means that he's filling in Mrs. Haven on a bunch of events that she was present for. In general, though, I thought that it worked in this book.

I'm not sure how I feel about the uncle-Waldemar-was-a-nazi plot. For a minute, it seemed like Walter's ultimate struggle was going to be coping with his family's dark history, and I was all about that. How do you reckon with a past that you weren't privy to, but which irrevocably changed the world? That's such an important question. When the people who partook in monstrous acts are dead and gone, whose responsibility is it to make reparations?

You are not going to find out in this book, which approaches the issue pretty directly and then takes a sharp left turn and completely ignores it. Had the book really examined any of those questions, I would have been fine with the inclusion of a Nazi main character. As it was, the whole Nazi thing felt a little bit lazy, short hand for "this guy is a BAD GUY" without any of the work to make us see that he really was a bad guy. The holocaust felt incidental to this book, which is really not appropriate.

I did enjoy the ultimate uncertainty of time travel. There are several characters who supposedly travel through time over the course of the novel, but it's unclear whether they're actually travelling through time or whether they're all a bit insane. (To be fair, they definitely are a bit insane - and I feel like the book handles this well. It's presented as the character's reaction to living in a world which does not agree with them, rather than as something that is inherently wrong with them.) The novel leans heavily toward the idea that the time travel is real, but Walter is anything but a reliable narrator and there are a lot of ways that you can interpret this.

A couple pieces of miscellany: Walter's dad, the sci-fi author, is called Orson Card Tolliver. I cannot imagine that this isn't some kind of shout out to Orson Scott Card but... why? I cannot figure out any way that this is significant, but if there's no reason then why is it here?? There was also a section written from the point of view of Joan Didion that I couldn't really wrap my had around. To be fair, I haven't read Joan Didion and I don't know much about her, but it just seemed so confusing and out of nowhere... I didn't really know what to do with it.

Overall I enjoyed this, just not quite as much as I expected to. The writing was on point and the characters were fascinating; the plot just didn't blow my mind the way that I wanted it to.

[Laurie · Rating 4 out of 5]

As other readers have commented, this book does begin with what may be the greatest first line: "This morning, at 08:47 EST, I woke up to find myself excused from time.” The novel starts with Waldemar “Waldy” Tolliver, a strange name for a strange man with a stranger family, going back four generations and whom have all been affected by the "syndrome, an obsession with time and the belief that it travels in circles rather than a straight line. They believe one can therefore "chrononavigate"the past, present, and future, if only one can be "shocked," if you will, out of the false mental construct of linear time. If this sounds weird, that is only further compounded by the second-person narrative to a woman named "Mrs. Haven," who's intimate connection to Waldy is only revealed way into the second half of the book. This is intermixed with other odd (and possibly gimmicky) literary stunts, such as Joan Didion stepping in as narrator to provide her own perspective on one of the many crazy events in the book, such as Waldy's older twin sisters' dinner parties, including guests such as Joan herself, Picasso, and other famous personages, dead or alive. The complications of the plot run suspiciously in circles, sometimes getting bogged down in places where it was just spinning too fast and too strange to keep a pace. Still, the book kept this reader on tenterhooks and waiting to find out if Waldy and his family were seriously mentally ill or actually on to something.

This book is hard to review. It is deeply weird, and the writing while often brilliant was also unsettling and confusing. There were more moments than I would've liked in which I felt I had to sit back and recalibrate my mind just to try and keep track of all the various characters and where they were in time and in relation to the main character. I also was a little let down by the ending, although I'm unsure what else he could've done to wrap it up. I will give him credit for coming "full circle."

This all said, despite being overly ambitious and circuitous, it was ultimately a unique and compelling love story with a time-travel twist--maybe. And I am still thinking about it.

[Chaitra · Rating 3 out of 5]

The premise of The Lost Time Accidents is that of accidentally discovered time travel, whose secret and formula is immediately lost, and its consequences on one family who will do whatever it is that is necessary to re-discover it. The narrator is the great-grandson of the discoverer, who is called Waldemar, after his crazy grand-uncle who happened to be a horrible Nazi; someone who tried to further the research into time-travel by using Jewish prisoners at the concentration camp he headed. The narrator has the onus of not only proving the time travel thing, but also of somehow compensating for the misdeeds of his grand-uncle.

The book is told in the form of a letter, the narrator stuck in a weird zone where time does not pass. I mean, he had enough to deal with what with his insane family (even without the grand-uncle, no one else is really sane), and no one would blame him for checking out of the time stream. But, the reason he's out of it is because he's in love with a mystery woman who is also married to a man who wants the secret of time travel. Our hero decides to write down a history of his family as a means to bring back his lover (I'm not sure why he thought it wouldn't send her running in the opposite direction screaming, but anyway).

It was interesting enough, but went on longer than it should have. It's also not a time travel book, the time travel is only a device for the study of a dysfunctional family, and Holocaust is also in the picture. It made me uncomfortable, a little, because I thought, towards the end, Waldemar the elder was portrayed as sympathetic. I'm not sure if that was intentional or I was projecting. Either way, it was uncomfortable reading. I didn't understand some threads of the plot at all (that of Julia and her motivations), but I also wasn't paying very close attention. At the end of it, I was glad I had read it, but I was also glad it was over.

[a_reader · Rating 4 out of 5]

Time makes a fool of us all.

What is Time? How do we perceive it? Does it flow in circles or a straight line? And is it possible to chrononavigate to the past and present? The Lost Time Accidents is about the essence of Time that is wrapped around an obscure tale of the Toula family. The story begins at the turn of the 19th Century in Central Europe and continues to present day Manhattan with a pit stop during the Holocaust. There's a lot going on in this hefty book and I loved it for the most part. I'm not a student of physics so when the nitty gritty details of various theories was discussed I was somewhat "lost" myself (LOL) but I could follow the narrative in a more abstract manner. Wray's humor was outstanding from the constant referencing of Albert Einstein as "The Patent Clerk", the Three Fruits from the cult, and every passage which included Orson and the twin sisters. This book is a very unique take on time travel in a more literary framework.

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

An insanely complex novel I couldn't for the life of me get into. Multi-generational stories, by definition, tend to be epic and this book is no different. However, what makes it complex is that it deals with so many abstract notion that it gets very difficult to track everything down. There is flashbacks, there is flashforwards, parallel narrative, etc. It's too much at times. I stopped reading it after the first half and I still have no clear idea as to who some important characters are. The text is weary. It wore me down. Reading has just become a burden for me, so I couldn't continue.

[Kian · Rating 2 out of 5]

One of the few books I've ever put down without finishing. Decent enough concept for me to try reading it (and get 80% of the way through) but ultimately the writing is so overwrought, the plot so slow, the characters so uninteresting, that I give up.

[Joe Kraus · Rating 4 out of 5]

This one has everything. It’s a sci-fi love story with Holocaust overtones, and it spans continents and generations. It’s just that sometimes everything is also a bit too much.

I should add that this is clever and well written throughout. I don’t know much about Wray, but he can certainly deliver. This is intricate and expansive, but its separate scenes work well, too. There are at least a dozen sections that made me want to copy and frame them. (As just one example, we get a great embedded essay, ascribed to Joan Didion, about the lives of the narrator’s two sometime-Bohemian aunts. It’s a great set piece.)

There are good and memorable parts to this almost everywhere you turn, and I will – again – insist that Wray is intriguingly talented. He’s mastered many voices, and he sets them all within a vast and clever plot.

Put another way, I loved every part of this novel, but I felt as if it got simply too large to be perfect.

I’m trying to get my tone to reflect my feelings here: this is much better than I imagined it would be, much better than run-of-the-mill contemporary sci-fi/fantasy. It’s just that it can go in so many interesting directions that it’s hard to hold it all in my head at once.

The basic premise here has our protagonist, Waldy, reflecting on his experience with falling out of time. He finds himself in a between-space, in a temporal zone that feels something like purgatory. All he can think to do is write his memoir – which is multi-generational – for the imagined audience of the woman he loves.

At times this borders on what they call “hard sci-fi” in the ways it asks us to be familiar with some of the controversy from the context of Einstein’s discovery of the theory of relativity. (In one of many clever and funny jokes, the Waldy’s family refuses to name Einstein – since his theories upended their ancestor’s – but refer to him ever and always as “the patent clerk.”) I looked up some of what felt like invented minor characters only to discover that, yes, Wray was referring to work by physicists of the early 20th century.

We get a lot of detail about Waldy’s great-grandfather’s supposed discovery of a formula demonstrating that time circles in on itself something like a rope of linked sausages, and the concept seems important. (It’s often intriguing, and Wray is always clever in discussing it.)

Toward the end, though, [SPOILER:] it seems increasingly as if a “time accident” is a matter simply of rejecting standard time. One of the aunts even makes a “time machine” out of an empty box. It works well enough as part of the narrative, but it feels a betrayal of the heavy work we’ve had philosophizing around the concept of time. I feel like an editor might have cut some of it out, but I’d also hated to have been the editor advocating getting rid of so much good stuff.

Similarly, we have a great-uncle who, as the Nazis rose to power, took over a concentration camp to test his theories on Jewish prisoners. The concepts are intriguing, and Wray never quite crosses the line of bad taste, but I wanted more mileage out of it or I wanted it cut. We’re made to believe that casting someone out of time is a harrowing thing, an experience that can torment, yet Waldy himself seems far less affected even as he has had that experience. It is, to be blunt, confusing. Wray is talented enough to keep it from feeling like a contradiction in the moment, but I can’t help feeling in retrospect that it is.

And, finally, we have the strange involvement of the Havens, both the “Mrs. Haven” to whom Waldy writes and her husband, a Scientology-type cult millionaire, who both believes and doubts the theories of Waldy’s great-grandfather – and has built his religion on the sci-fi/porn novels that Waldy’s father churned out as quasi-vehicles for revealing those theories. It’s never clear how we’re supposed to see Mrs. Haven – as a sympathetic woman trying to remove her golden shackles or as someone exploiting Waldy’s attraction to her. Given that the end of the novel turns on that question – [FULL SPOILER: Waldy discovers at last that he has fled time because he cannot process the fact that she and her husband have been killed in a seemingly arbitrary plane crash (that might also have been a successful time travel test).] – it’s hard to know how to feel about the novel in full.

In other words, are we asked to take this as fundamentally a heart-rending story of a man who just misses the great love of his life or as a clever sci-fi exploration of the paradox of time?

It’s to Wray’s credit that this feels as if it could be either. Still, I can’t help feeling that this novel – which has everything – could have been even better if it left some of those possibilities out.

[Eye of Sauron · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was minding my own business, watching the broad and desolate expanses of my empire from the top of my tower, when Gandalf materialized directly in front of me. His clothes, once gray, were slightly singed and bleached in intermittent patterns, and the same was true of his facial follicles. In his shaking hand he held what appeared to be some kind of blue metallic pickle.

I blinked (a monumental effort considering my corporal status), but the curious Gandalfic apparition didn't move, other than the steady chest-heaving of intense physical exertion. The tip of his hat let off a small bit of steam.

"Where did you come from?" I asked, flabbergasted for the first time in my considerable duration.

Gandalf the no-longer-Gray looked up at me gravely. "Everywhen."

He went on to explain that during the course of his battle with the Balrog at the bridge of Khazad-Dûm, he and his nemesis suffered an unfortunately prolongated fall, but as he whizzed through the air, he noticed and reflexively grabbed a shiny blue object lodged in a small recess in the crag. He brought it to his mouth – not of his own accord, mind you; the Balrog slammed into him – and then suddenly they found themselves on top of a snowy mountain near the Pass of Caradhras. They did battle, leaping randomly through interdimensional timestreams with the aid of the space pickle (although he insisted on the use of the phrase "pan-dimensional transfer voucher"), for hundreds of years, until Gandalf ultimately conquered his foe by leaving him stranded in the primordial muck of pre-Mordor.

"And then," he gasped, clutching his sides, "I teleported involuntarily throughout the entirety of the cosmos – even through a previously unknown terrifying place called Detroit – until I ended up here. I was gray when I left; I believe I shall be positively white upon the exhaustion of this powerful gherkin."

Almost as an afterthought, he added, "You're rather nearsighted for such a large eye," before vanishing into thin air.

In retrospect, I probably should have thought about that a little more.

[Allison · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't know, man. I kept putting this on hold at the library, missing the pickup date and having to put it on hold again, and then I finally got it. I thought it was a time-travel story, and as a time-travel story it really doesn't work. As whatever it's actually trying to be? Well, I'm not entirely sure it works as that either. For the first quarter or so I was so consistently amused and engaged by the writing style and the frequent brilliant and hilarious turns of phrase that I didn't really care - I loved how Einstein is only ever referred to as "the patent clerk". Then things started to drag a little and by the end I was pretty much finishing it out of duty. There's some good stuff in here, but I didn't really feel like it hung together enough to be a great novel. Maybe I just didn't get it.

[Neil · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a lot of fun to read: there are numerous "laugh out loud" moments, normally because of the author's turn of phrase. There were several occasions when I interrupted my wife's reading of a long novel about Henry VIII to read sentences to her just because they amused me so much.

And it's an interesting story. Against the background of Einstein's (referred to as "The Patent Clerk" rather than by name) development of relativity and the world wars, a story develops of a family battling against a time travel related curse. To say more would be to spoil the story, I think.

Highly original, very entertaining and a good story. Some scientific discussion that might put some people off, but none of it desperately technical.

[Jill · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating! I had some questions still at the end, and I'm not sure I understood everything completely (could be user error). However, I know that I will re-read this (which I rarely say) I found it to be so creative and interesting that I have to give it 5 stars. A reminder of the sheer joy of a great story! Thank you John Wray.

[Morgan King · Rating 2 out of 5]

thank god this is over

[Ash · Rating 2 out of 5]

There was a lot of beauty in this book, the writing is excellent...but I’m at a loss with the science. In terms of a family history narrative and generational love story, I was totally satisfied. But I supposed that much of the nuance of the story was lost on me with its heavy dependence on physics, mathematics, relativity, thermodynamics, etc.

[Rogue Male · Rating 3 out of 5]

6/10

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

An Exhilirating Blend of Science, History, Philosophy and Fiction Worthy of Exceptional Praise

This is a most beguiling, truly imaginative, mess of a novel, and I use the word "mess" to praise John Wray's superb storytelling craft and prose, worthy of comparison with the likes of Italo Calvino, William Gibson, David Mitchell and Haruki Murakami. It is an impressive fictional trek through 20th Century European and American history, cloaked as a genre-bending cross between time-travel speculative fiction and film nourish crime thriller; a trek seen through the eyes of a family of liars, thieves and murderers, who regard a former Swiss patent clerk, one Albert Einstein, as their family's most despised enemy, believing that only they themselves, not Einstein, truly understand time and the known physical laws of the universe. Much of the family's saga is seen through the eyes of young Waldemar "Waldy" Tolliver via a series of letters to his lover Mrs. Haven, that other reviewers recognize as memorable love letters to the craft of writing fiction. Named for his wickedly brilliant grand uncle Waldemar Toula, Tolliver discovers that he has left the flow of time itself, set up in a different reality where time doesn't exist. In the course of trying to reconnect with time itself, Waldy Tolliver will take us on a mesmerizing trek through some of the dark corners and recesses of Central European history, especially in the years leading up to and during World War II, when his relative Waldemar Toula discovers how to jump back and forth through time, recreating the fatal discovery made by his father Ottokar in Znojmo, Moravia, near the dawn of the 20th Century. Miraculously, Wray has written a spellbinding work of fiction that delves deeply into history, philosophy and physics that may interest anyone who has enjoyed reading not only the writers I have cited, but also such eminent scientist authors as Brian Greene, Stephen Jay Gould and Carl Sagan, treating us to a riveting fictional celebration of the rise of modern physics. With "The Lost TIme Accidents", John Wray has written the most impressive melding of science and fiction I have read since James Morrow's vastly underrated "Galapagos Regained"; without question, Wray has written one of the most important American novels published not only this year, but maybe, in this decade, that, like Morrow's "Galapagos Regained", does a remarkable job in melding science with fiction.

[Alistair · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this. Broad in its scope (multiple generations, countries, characters), with a focussed depth on time travel - never a bad topic for fiction, it kept its story going through all its 500 pages.
Why only 4 stars, I have been asking myself? It's clear I enjoyed it, it had lots in a book that I like. It ended "properly" (here isnt somewhere I'm going to elaborate too much on that, but *I* know what I mean and that's the important thing), it had no discomfiting plotlines, annoying traits.
I think, possibly, it just needed a little bit too much thought to follow. There were multiple things I was waiting to have explained, elaborated upon, gone back to... and although many did it meant I had a lot of things going on which I was just putting to one side, only thinking a bit about, sometimes going back to check if I'd missed something (mostly I hadn't).
But it was worth the read, I'd recommend it, and indeed i have already, to my son (who i think would enjoy the slightly hammed up postulations about physics).

[Gem BookEater · Rating 4 out of 5]

John Wray’s The Lost Time Accidents is an epic novel that follows the path of a the family of a man who seems to die just as he’s discovered time-travel. The final piece of the puzzle is lost with him but his sons believe they can replicate his experiments and find the secret themselves.

As the twentieth century develops and war breaks out in Europe one son leaves and travels to America, while his brother uses the prison camps to conduct more experiments.
Their story, and that of the rest of the family is told in a letter written by the great grandson ‘Waldy’ Tolliver to his lost love. He has plenty of time to write this letter as he seems to have been exiled from the flow of time himself. Can he find his way back and unmake his romantic mistakes?

Time travel will always be a popular narrative for novelists but this one is most inventive in its use. The past isn’t explored by time travel but bought back to life through family stories of turn-of-the-century Viennese salons and how Einstein’s radical new theory stole their thunder, and reminisces about the golden age of post-war pulp science fiction and how they accidentally inspired a modern religion.

It isn’t until the last eighth or so of the book that we discover if the Nazi Waldy is named after really did discover time travel or not, and what that could mean for the world.

This is a big novel, but quite engrossing. It doesn’t suffer from a lack of editing, every word is either necessary to the plot or necessary to its beauty. It took me about a week to finish it so a good one for when you have regular reading time in your day, I imagine if you had to just read it at weekends it could get a little confusing.

NB I received a free copy of this book through NetGalley in return for an honest review which appeared first on The BookEaters blog - http://www.thebookeaters.co.uk/the-lo...