The Teleportation Accident

Woodkin's diction was so gracefully servile that it didn't sound like he was speaking out loud so much as just drawing your attention to a particular combination of semantic units that he wondered if you might find appealing.

I am on a Ned Beauman jag because I enjoyed Lumpfish so much that I had to try out his other published works.

The novel begins in 1931 Berlin and it has as its protagonist a young man, Egon Loeser, a wealthy, german intellectual and theatre set designer. Egon’s biggest problem is that simply can not “get laid”, such that early on in the story he believes that he had a “near miss” with an attractive young lady, Adele Hitler, and he spends the remainder of the novel pursuing her, in the process emigrating first to Paris and then to Los Angeles. His non-sexual obsession is to develop a theatrical “teleportation device”, that is to say a “prop” with special effects to “teleport” actors to different areas of the stage during a play. The device is in homage to his idol, a famous set designer, Lavancini who, in 1679, somehow blew up a theatre, killing 25 people, during a play which for the first time included a teleportation device.

This is weird book that I would compare to “The Big Lebowski” in that Loeser is very quirky and clueless, for example, he is terrified of riding in anything but a tram, but he comes to LA(!) and attempts at first to get around on foot. While he does not identify as a “detective” he is, throughout the book, trying to find his “damsel”, Adele. Of course he runs into people who thwart his quest and in at least a couple of cases the situations he encounters are hilarious. Much of the book is concurrent with World War II and Egon keeps encountering Jewish refugees, prior “friends”, he thought he left behind in Berlin, all the while Loeser sincerely professes not to know anything about politics.

This book will be for some readers, such as me, hilarious but I gotta figure this is not for everybody.