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Time travel! I always say time travel doesn’t work, and it doesn’t. It does not work. You cannot make it work, there will always be some tangle in the wires that breaks the book when you decide to actually think about it. But I read a lot of time travel anyway, and in this case, the device (though a physical music box) is more a device of ideas than of practicalities. In terms of ideas, this book is a wealth: fascism, family, mathematics, the erasure of women, love. How Menger-Anderson handles each theme varies in the quality of its delivery, but there’s plenty to dissect.

The short: split initially between two time periods, the book follows Hase–a young, off the grid woman living in 2016 San Francisco, editing Wikipedia, and searching for her odd, boat-dwelling father–and two men connected to a circle of intellectuals in 1933-5 Austria. One is Anton Moritz–a closeted gay professor of mathematics taking a new job in Vienna–and the other is Josef Zedlacher–a mean-minded failure of the academy who waits tables while his ambitions simmer poisonously inside him. Twining between these three narrators is Haskell Gaul, an angelically curly-haired mystery gay and math genius who seems to be traveling through time using a music box he created. He wants to “fix� what this time travel has done to his own life and others�. He wants Anton’s brilliant help to do it. Josef, wanting the world, sees the destruction of these people as the key to his ambitions. And, bearing his name nearly a century later, there is the Zedlacher Institute, which sustains the late Josef’s fanatical desire to destroy them, to own their work, to rise above everyone he sees.

And here is the fascism: what is fascism, embraced by a culture, but also encapsulated by a single man? The dreadful creep of violence, anti-intellectualism, and the original Nazis through 1930s Austria brings a chill and a ticking clock to the historical portions of the story, but fascism is exemplified just as effectively in the covetous, profoundly selfish mindset of Josef Zedlacher. Not every writer understands the critical link between a man who says in his small ways “this research is owed to me because I want it� “this woman who is not as I want her to be is what I want� “this server must understand that he is beneath me� “this disappointment I suffer must be transformed into someone else’s ruin� and nationalistic, authoritarian mass movements. Sometimes Josef is, as a character, wielded too coarsely, but I admire the decision to allow his insidious narration to wedge its way between sections narrated by essentially decent people. As a recollection of grim history and an examination of internal mechanisms that still transform hideous individuals into ruined countries, it does its job.

The love: there are moments of great poignancy in the romance of this book, which you can tell by the process of elimination is between the homosexual math geniuses, Anton and Haskell. In certain moments this is doing exactly what I wish some of the romance novels I’ve been reading lately would buckle down and do. The tragic strain of a world that doesn’t allow you, the chemistry, the sense of urgency and lightness and genius that comes along with falling in love, the way physical and intellectual desire can intertwine–it’s so damn romantic. I am also horrifically romantic, so that element worked wonderfully for me. I noticed when I was midway through the book that one reader review calls it “light� romance–but in fact, it drives the entire plot. It drives Anton and Haskell, it drives the furious Josef, it drives Hase to her present life and into her ultimate choices. Not only that, but it’s hard for me to accept “light� as a descriptor for “being gay in 1935 Vienna.� The path forward in that scenario is not clear and it is very hard and sharp.

The erasure of women: the jacket copy very boldly uses this phrase, “the erasure of women from history� as a front and center element of the book. Menger-Anderson, I admit, does end there, and threads it throughout, and gives us Hase as the first and last voice of the story, but she spends a lot of time in the middle showing you this erasure by focusing on men. The female characters are excellent characters, but other than Hase they are shunted to the back row, in large part so that the author can hit you in the last chapters with a “see? see? you also forgot about women!�

But I didn’t, though–I understood from the beginning that Fraulein Popovic, who you see doesn’t even show up until this far into my review–was pivotal, central, essential, a point around which the whole plot spins. Most of the ways in which this is true are spoilers, which makes it hard to describe how utterly important she is. But I notice, reading review after review in professional journals, that no one spares a single word to mention her. Not her name, not even without her name. On the one hand you might think, “But that’s the point! Women are pivotal and still forgotten!� On the other hand, I might say that if the point was very *well* made, at least one reviewer would have felt they couldn’t complete their assignment without telling us she exists.

This point of women’s erasure is also made by and through Hase, who wrests control from men at the end of the novel - spoilers, spoilers again - to make her own path. But I am not satisfied with her path, and it feels very easy to say, “But she gains autonomy and chooses her course!� I don’t know. It sits crookedly with me. She makes a hard decision and it’s unclear who actually benefits from it. I’m inclined to think that the beneficiary is not Hase at all–it’s still the men. She is an odd, memorable, decisive, impossible character, but when the first few chapters swerve hard into Anton’s story of 80 years earlier, it feels like she’s been cut off mid-sentence and shoved to the side. That change is so abrupt and jarring, and in the end even though she’s the one who’s speaking I still feel like she is being pushed to the side, and still for Anton’s story.

Despite the disjointure, despite my qualms about the execution of theme and the fate of Hase, despite occasional dropped threads and the fact that having a time-traveling music box at the crux of your novel feels so J.J. Abrams� Alias (2001-2006) that I could cry, I overwhelmingly am glad I read this book. It’s meaty, it’s thought-provoking, it has a quiet tension that urges you to see how things play out. It is odd and idea-driven and sentimental without being safe. It’s got beautiful prose. It has honestly taught me so much about Wikipedia. It reminds me that we never know our parents and that being able to perceive them fully is a terrifying gift and curse, worth handling tenderly if you can handle it at all. It makes me think we should get rid of our phones. It makes me think that there are good things in dark places.