In Another Time: A Novel
Hanna Ginsberg awakens in the middle of a field near Berlin with no memory of how she got there. The kindly nuns who rescue her inform her that it is 1946, and Hanna realizes that she has lost ten years, her home, and her lover. All she has left is her beloved Stradivarius, and she attempts to piece her life back together in postwar Germany, England, and Paris. Cantor’s narrative jumps back and forth in time, shifting from Hanna’s point of view before and after her lost decade, and that of her lover, Max, a bookstore owner who becomes increasingly desperate to protect Hanna (who is Jewish) from the fate he can foresee through a mysterious process that can’t be described without spoiling things for readers.
The pace of the novel is compelling if you can accept its fantastical premise, but except for Hanna, the characters are thinly drawn, and the prose is workmanlike and repetitive. Hanna’s primary passion is for her music, which is perfectly reasonable, but because of this, the love story that is central to the novel lacks emotional urgency. Max and Hanna’s on-again, off-again relationship takes up far too much space, and the reader longs for more detail about the complacency of “good Germans” in the face of Hitler’s rise. The time-shifting is managed cleverly enough, however, that the reader is willing to hang on until the end to see if all of Hanna’s questions get answered.
