SF/F Review - The Man Who Folded Himself
The Man Who Folded Himself, by David Garrold
Synopsis: Dude gets a Timebelt, throws a party for time travelers, and parties with himself for the rest of forever (since he’s the only time traveler) in USA 1999.
Book Review: This novel needs to be accepted as two things - What It Is Not, and What It Is.
What It Is Not is a story that cares about technicalities and paradoxes. It does start out with pretending it’ll have a single self-consistent timeline, but it’s a lie and the book would have been better without it, because ultimately it’s a few dozen pages of distraction. We quickly learn that this is a Shenanigans Story, where time travel doesn’t need to make sense, paradoxes are whatevs, and we get plenty of alternate-timeline-selves running around messing with each other. Which is fine, not every story is a self-consistent rigorous exercise like Primer or Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (yes really), some are just about fun shenanigans! But pretending otherwise for a little bit is a kinda dodgy imo.
Also What It Is Not is a story about doing things in the timeline. Sure, there are brief interludes where he says “Oh yeah, I did go and mess with history, to see what would happen. I took out Jesus. I killed Hitler. I did X Y and Z just to see what changes.” These asides basically turn into lists of single-sentence “I did this thing”s. Once he just rattles off a lot of assassinations he stopped. He relates that he had a crime-prevention thing going for a while. We get a list of famous events in history that he went to witness. In every case it’s boring as hell, cuz who cares about reading someone’s grocery list of historical stuff? Fortunately it’s only ever a few paragraphs and you can skip them easy to get back to the real story.
But you won’t read about someone doing things in history (or the future) (or messing with the present), cuz this ain’t about that.
What It Is is a book about coming to understand yourself. From the start we’re told “I was always afraid that I was basically unlikable.” Like most of us, Daniel is a lonely nerd. Unlike most of us, Daniel has a time machine, so he isn’t forced to find a way to interact with others anyway to stave off crippling loneliness. He can jump to a different time and have a conversation with himself from the future (or past). In fact, he can decide to go to a certain time/location and have a party with a bunch of himselves from all different points in his life! He never has to risk interacting with a human who isn’t himself again!
The rest of the book is an exploration of this. How a person adapts to such an environment, how it shapes him across an entire lifetime of this, and how such a life ultimately resolves. Along the way there are questions of identity, freedom of choice among pre-knowledge, and self-discovery. There is a lot of ruminating. There is a lot of talking.
It was beautiful, and left me glowing.
Based on recent events in a podcast of mine, one might think I don’t like stories without much plot-action and with lots of rumination and talking. Not true! I love character work, and a lot of character work is done via those methods. Action is great because it reveals character, or shapes character (often both) but it’s not a requirement. However, I do need character-driven stories to progress the character(s) in significant ways. I will point out that this novel brought the protagonist from a repressed childish college student to an old man with significant growth, over several highly impactful events, in under 38,000 words! And honestly 2-3k of those were unnecessary. Sure, it’s easier when almost all the characters in your novel are just one character folded over and over, but still! I read this in two settings, and part of what made it so fulfilling was that I could take it all in and bask in its entirety without losing huge parts of it from my context window.
How much you like this novel is directly related to how much you identify with the protagonist. If you see in him exactly the greatest fear you harbor in yourself, and seeing him struggle with that and keep smashing against it over and over, and then you get an ending that actually touches you on a… hell, basically on a spiritual level (I should write a spoilers post on this book)… anyway, if he’s you then this book is absolutely amazing and you’ll love it. Obvs I fit this description. It’s going on my bookshelf, the me of two weeks ago ABSOLUTELY should read this. Highly Recommended.
Book Club Review: Turns out, the less someone is like the protagonist, the less they like this book. Reception at our book club was extremely varied, with one person flat-out detesting it. People who just find this guy tedious are not gonna be taken on an amazing journey.
Also, boy howdy are expectations a thing! I had previously read the short story (almost flash fiction tbh) that inspired this novel, and I recognized it almost immediately. So by page 5 I was settled into “Oh, this is going to really explore how the heck [redacted]’s Crazy Big Idea resolves, in a great amount of detail! Neat!” I was expecting a lot of personal stuff and almost zero Altering The Past/Present/Future. Other readers didn’t see this coming (or hadn’t read the inspiring piece) and kept thinking that action was going to happen. That a sports almanac would show up or a butterfly would get stepped on or something. They were very disappointed.
That being said — the best book club meetings of all are the ones where there is a broad range of opinions & takes that everyone can discuss and dissect. And at just 140 pages it’s easy even for people who don’t like it to finish, and show up to the meeting, and offer takes. We had a lot of discussion! We had more discussion than we do for books 3x the length of this one. Some of it was eye-rolly, exasperated “wtf even” discussion, but it was always entertaining, and personal things were revealed. So, yeah. Recommended.
The Man Who Folded Himself, by David Garrold, Amazon affiliate link