The Little Book

Timing. That’s a triple, quadruple, quintuple entendre, at least, but one you will only understand after reading this most wonderful story. At this moment, this book strikes me as being my favorite novel of the year. There are so many intersections for in this book for me: history (my college major), Greek literature (one of my college minors), anti-Semitism and the Holocaust (I married a Jew and then became one), Freud the father of psychoanalysis (I am a psychoanalyst), and the recurring loop of family events/connections/passions (my daughter suggested this book for me knowing that I was traveling to Vienna). In what other book do you run across an author who is equal parts adventure writer, travel writer, scholar, theoretical physicist (I say what with tongue in cheek), and historian. So cleverly, the author ties together Freud’s ideas about the Oedipus Complex with his characters and interactions with each other, exploring what was right and wrong about the great doctor’s ideas.

Edwards’ story makes use of time travel, and I’ve been fascinated with the fantasy of time travel since I was a boy. “Boys’ Life” the monthly magazine for Boy Scouts carried a great series about time travel during my latency years. There was the “WABAC” or Wayback Machine by Mr. Peabody and Sherman in “The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show,” cartoons that first aired from 1959 to 1964 in my early adolescence. And of course, there was H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, written in 1895, and made into the first of two movies in 1960 (much better than the 2002 version).

Edwards’ story mostly takes place in 1897 Vienna, but it jumps back and forth to 1988 in California and Boston, as well as to important events between, including WWII and the plans for the invasion of France by the Allies. The protagonist is Frank Standish Burden III, also known as Wheeler, but his father and grandfather, mother and grandmother are juxtaposed throughout the story at different ages as Edwards takes us back and forth through time. The time travel idea works beautifully.

This book was a lifetime effort by Selden Edwards, and I’m delighted to have had the chance to read it. Whatever book I choose next will be the victim of the “John Wooden effect.” After a legendary event or person, no matter how good the next coach, the next event, the next book, it will never measure up to the preceding one. I’m traveling in Croatia, a few days from flying to Vienna for the first time, and I’m more prepared to see the city and more knowledgeable about it’s history than I was before.