The Expert of Subtle Revisions

Menger-Anderson debuts with an eloquent story of time travel and family secrets. It begins with a 21-year-old woman named Hase, who was raised in San Francisco by an adoptive mathematician father, with whom she shares a hobby of editing Wikipedia pages, including one devoted to the late Josef Zedlacher, an Austrian who claimed people can travel through time. When her father disappears while sailing his boat, she wonders if he’s become a time traveler. In a parallel narrative set in 1933, young mathematician Anton Moritz lectures on geometry at a university in Vienna. His greatest hope is to join the intellectual circle of philosopher Walfried Engelhardt, which includes Albert Einstein, but he encounters competition from the jealous Zedlacher. Past and present collide as Hase, Anton, and Josef are caught up in the search for a music box that functions as a time machine. Menger-Anderson does an excellent job of recreating the fraught academic and cultural life of Vienna before the 1938 Anschluss, and she effectively sustains the pretzel logic of time travel. It’s an appealing intellectual mystery.