A review by oczerniecka
The Lost Time Accidents by John Wray

3.0

“Time is a misbehaving Thing because it moves and you can’t see it. If you can’t see it how do you know it’s moving? You don’t know. But it’s gone and now you’re in a different Place. It’s going and moving and taking Things with it. Always in the one Direction, never the others, but Nobody can find out where it’s going. My Grandfather found out. He called it the Accidents because nobody could guess the Direction.”

Wow, I really don’t know what to make out of this book. It is a multi-generation tale of a family that is, let say, obsessed with Time. Story spans hounded years of history, takes place in Czechoslovakia, Austria and United States and mentions historic events and science inventions, there is a bit about Holocaust, and there is something about Einstein and other scientist, relativity theory, there is event something about Gustav Klimt and his painting “The Kiss”. So there is a lot going on in the story.

Story is narrated by the youngest of the family, Waldemar “Waldy” Tolliver. We first meet him in the apartment in Harlem, NYC, where he is suspended in time and where he is working on writing down and understating history of his family. And the family is full of eccentric characters. It all starts with his great great-grandfather in Easter Europe in Znajmo. The first of Toula family to work on Time Accidents. Then there are his two sons that are determined to work on his father’s inheritance and found out what he discovered before his death, Waldemar and Kasper. Waldemar is very eccentric one, the one I cannot really understand. He is showing for a bits throughout the whole story, and he is known in history as a Black Timeskeepr of Czas, he was performing experiments in a Nazi death camp in a town called Czas (which in Polish means Time). Kasper is not obsessed with the Time as much, and overall seems to have a fairly normal life, that ends in Bufallo in the States. He has three children, girl twins and a boy who is our narrator’s father. The sisters are fascinated with Time and its nature and spend their life on working on it. The son, Orson become a sci-fi writer, mostly for pulp magazines writing porn filled time travel stories, and later novels. His first novel becomes foundation for a cult.

Ok, there is just way too much in the story to actually put it here. It has everything, but did nothing for me.