Review “Expert of subtle revisions”: history, language is not neutral

This is how the grandfather's paradox was explained to me for the first time: imagine a boy whose grandfather invented a time machine. The boy hates his grandfather and, in an anger crisis, uses the time machine to visit his grandfather at the teenager and kill him. In doing so, the grandfather will not have the chance to invent the time machine or meet the grandmother, therefore the boy's father and therefore the boy himself will not be born. Killing his grandfather should, in other words, flash the boy of existence-but if he does not exist, he cannot 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 child 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 appreciate him when fiction about time travel addresses delicate interpersonal questions. The new book by Kirsten Menger-Anderson, “the expert in subtle revisions”, does exactly that, while exploring the way history is strongly affected by the way it is told and that makes the story.

The brilliant cover of the novel imitates a Wikipedia entrance 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, it does not exist. It has no birth certificate, no social security number, no government file of any kind. However, online, it is, as the title of the book tells us, an expert in subtle revisions, which, although minor, is extremely important because language, like history, is never neutral. She will change “killed” into “murdered”, for example, “riot” to “protest”, “she was beaten” for “he was beating it”.

The novel opens on June 11, 2016, Hase's birthday; She is supposed to meet her father in Half Moon Bay. He does not show, which is different from him, and this is only the first in a series of strange events. The Hase Share apartment with Jake, the former student of his father, is ransacked, and all that is stolen is the laptop of Hase and the articles of Jake, “the unfortunate attempts to solve arcanic mathematical problems”. The next day, Hase was contacted by a foreigner looking for his father. She discovers that man is associated with the Zedlacher Institute – a shaded organization devoted to its founder, Josef Zedlacher, and to resolve the mystery of time travel. More specifically, they are after a young man named Haskell Gaul, who, according to Zedlacher, is a traveler in time.

The second narrator of the novel, Anton, is a professor at the University of Vienna in 1933. Other chapters followed his contemporary, Zedlacher. These historical sections focus on the increasingly tense relationship of men, although they do not mean for each other at the beginning; They simply move among the same circles of mathematics and philosophy and float around Professor Engelhardt and his exclusive group of intellectuals. While Anton can afford to work as an unpaid lecturer at the university in the hope of obtaining a remunerated professor, Zedlacher – whose family lost his fortune during the First World War and the collapse of the Austro -Hungarian Empire – works as a delivery man and night chief in a cafe where he expects the even people whose ranks wish to join.

Hase is a fascinating narrator in part because it is so difficult to identify. When other people project their opinions on her, she does not correct them, and she does not reveal much to readers. It is clear that her ability to move around the world is somewhat limited to being raised without official or legal links with institutions, not even apparently benevolent like public libraries, and yet she seems to have been largely happy before the disappearance of her father.

The chapters of 1933, on the other hand, feel strangely contemporary. Anton worries, for example, about the new production of “Hundert Tage” – co -written by Benito Mussolini – playing in Vienna: “(It) increased my fears that political tensions uncomfortable to turn into a civil war. He had discreetly organized a coup. Readers know what is coming, of course – the annexation of Austria in Nazi Germany is only a few years in Anton's future – and evidence is everywhere, Jews and leftists attacked in the streets to the sweet censorship of the University of what it considers as radical ideas and voices.

“The expert in subtle revisions” is not a political book in itself, any more than moralization. Menger-Anderson did not connect openly in 1933 came to the first and second Trump administrations in the near future of Hase. Instead, the plot follows Hase's investigation into his father's disappearance and the possible meeting of Anton and Zedlacher with the time traveler Haskell. But as Hase herself knows by modifying Wikipedia, neither history nor the language are neutral, and Menger-Anderson superbly demonstrates how a writer does not need to avoid political tensions of a historical period but can use them to increase and contextualize the frame, character and intrigue.

Masad, a critic of books and culture, is the author of the novel “All My Mother's Lovers” and the next novel “Beings”.