Mahler's Time

One night, physicist David Mahler makes a strange discovery in a dream. He had occupied himself with the problem of time for four years, posing the question whether its direction was a truly unalterable law of nature or whether it would be possible to find something that reversed its course. And now he holds the solution in his hand.

»For a moment, he didn’t know where he was. Something had happened. On the table in front of him, there was a pile of thirty pages that had been written on, scribbled on in large, shaky handwriting: slightly slanting columns of numbers, sketches, curves … all of this was, if you were able to understand it, of brightly perfect clarity.« The oldest law of nature had been called into question and the foundations of the world along with it. Is one of humanity’s dreams about to finally come true? Is it possible to look into the future? And could humans bear to take this look? Mahler wants to attract attention to his gargantuan discovery, but without authority in the world of academia, this proves to be exceedingly difficult. With determination close to obsession, he seeks out the support of Nobel Prize winner Valentinov, but strange coincidences keep thwarting their meeting. In a suggestive tone, Daniel Kehlmann makes his hero’s doubts and premonitions comprehensible and the reader a witness of an experiment as a result of which, time would have to be defined in an entirely new manner.