This is how the grandfather paradox was first explained to me: Imagine a boy whose grandfather invented a time machine. The boy hates his grandfather and, in a fit of anger, uses the time machine to visit his grandfather as an adolescent and murder him. By doing so, the grandfather won’t have the chance to invent the time machine nor meet the grandmother, so the boy’s father and therefore the boy himself won’t be born. Killing his grandfather should, in other words, make the boy blink right out of existence — but if he doesn’t exist, then he can’t go back in time and kill his grandfather, so the grandfather lives after all and meets the grandmother and invents a time machine and has a son who has a kid who hates his grandfather and tries to kill him.
As a child, I wondered why the boy hated his grandfather so much and why he didn’t just kill the man in the present, so as an adult, I enjoy it when fiction about time travel addresses tricky interpersonal questions. Kirsten Menger-Anderson’s new book, “The Expert of Subtle Revisions,” does just that, while exploring the way history is perforce affected by how it is told and who does the telling.
The novel’s brilliant cover mimics a Wikipedia entry because the first narrator we meet, Hase, is a frequent Wikipedia editor. Hase (the German word for rabbit or hare, pronounced haa-zah) opens the book by telling us that, officially, she doesn’t exist. She has no birth certificate, no Social Security number, no governmental records of any kind. Yet online she is, as the book’s title tells us, an expert at subtle revisions, which though minor, are immensely important because language, like history, is never neutral. She’ll change “killed” to “murdered,” for instance, “riot” to “protest,” “she was beaten” to “he beat her.”
The novel opens on June 11, 2016, Hase’s birthday; she’s supposed to meet her father in Half Moon Bay. He doesn’t show, which is unlike him, and that’s only the first in a series of strange events. The apartment Hase shares with Jake, her father’s former student, is ransacked, and all that’s stolen are Hase’s laptop and Jake’s papers, “hapless attempts to solve arcane math problems.” The next day, Hase is contacted by a stranger looking for her father. She discovers that the man is associated with the Zedlacher Institute — a shady organization devoted to its founder, Josef Zedlacher, and to solving the mystery of time travel. More specifically, they’re after a young man named Haskell Gaul, whom Zedlacher claims is a time traveler.
The novel’s second narrator, Anton, is a professor at the University of Vienna in 1933. Other chapters follow his contemporary, Zedlacher. These historical sections focus on the men’s increasingly tense relationship, although they mean little to one another at first; they merely move among the same math and philosophy circles and flutter around professor Engelhardt and his exclusive group of intellectuals. While Anton can afford to work as an unpaid lecturer at the university in the hopes of getting a paid professorship, Zedlacher — whose family lost its fortune during World War I and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire — works as a bookkeeper and night manager at a café where he waits on the very people whose ranks he wishes to join.
Hase is a fascinating narrator in part because she’s so hard to pin down. When other people project their opinions onto her, she doesn’t correct them, nor does she reveal much of herself to readers. It’s clear her ability to move in the world is somewhat constrained by being raised without any official or legal ties to institutions, not even seemingly benevolent ones like public libraries, and yet she appears to have been largely content before her father’s disappearance.
The 1933 chapters, meanwhile, feel eerily contemporary. Anton worries, for instance, about the new production of “Hundert Tage” — co-written by Benito Mussolini — playing in Vienna: “[It] heightened my fears that Austria’s uneasy political tensions would devolve into civil war. Just last month, Chancellor Dollfuss had dissolved the nation’s parliament, and though he maintained that the legislative body ‘eliminated itself,’ many felt, myself included, that he’d quietly staged a coup.” Readers know what’s coming, of course — the annexation of Austria into Nazi Germany is only a few years in Anton’s future — and the evidence is everywhere, from the Jews and leftists attacked in the streets to the university’s increasing soft censorship of what it deems as radical ideas and voices.
“The Expert of Subtle Revisions” isn’t a political book, per se, nor is it moralizing. Menger-Anderson doesn’t overtly connect 1933 Vienna with the first and second Trump administrations in Hase’s near future. Instead, the plot follows Hase’s investigation of her father’s disappearance and Anton and Zedlacher’s eventual encounter with time traveler Haskell. But as Hase herself knows from editing Wikipedia, neither history nor language are neutral, and Menger-Anderson superbly demonstrates how a writer needn’t shy away from the political tensions of a historical period but can use them to heighten and contextualize setting, character and plot.
Masad, a books and culture critic, is the author of the novel “All My Mother’s Lovers” and the forthcoming novel “Beings.”
