The Little Book, Selden Edwards

The Little Book by Selden Edwards

This book is a time-travel fantasy. Many fantasies of time travel have been written, and this is another one. In this book, the author travels back in time to Vienna in the year 1897, and describes the famous people, such as Freud and Mahler, who are beginning their famous work, as well as the political climate of that time, in which the mayor of Vienna, Karl Lueger, is using anti-semitism to gain political popularity. The book seems to follow Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, and indeed the author includes Mark Twain in his tale as a visitor to Vienna in 1897.

All books require a good story and good writing. In my view, this book has a bit of both, but only at the "C" level. Parts of the fantasy are interesting, amusing and completely unexpected, while I found other parts of the fantasy too corny, too contrived, too fake for my tastes. I found it interesting to read about Vienna in 1897, and I enjoyed reading the author's description of Freud and Mahler's work, but I thought the author's description of the origins of anti-semitism to be mistaken.

While I was amused by much of the tale, I found the author's need for the protagonist to lead and teach EVERYTHING to be too much. The tale would have been more fun for me if the protagonist had been more human. The story also did not hold together in some ways. For example, it was interesting to me that both the protagonist and his father were illegitimate. The father was the illegitimate child of a Jewish teacher and friend of the mother, and the protagonist was the illegitimate child of his mother and an unknown military man in England just before D-Day in World War II. Yet, the author constantly referred to the protagonist as having inherited traits of his "father".

The story has several twists that I found interesting or amusing. The illegitimacy of the two principal male characters was interesting. Why did the author include that in the book; it was unnecessary to the story, although it was interesting. In addition, the love affair between the protagonist and his grandmother in 1897 Vienna was also interesting. The author required 33 years to write this book, so he had plenty of time to get all the details straight, and yet he did not do that.

All in all, the book was good subway reading, but certainly not great literature.

I found some of the reviews at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Powells interesting.