The Teleportation Accident
A fiendishly clever novel long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, The Teleportation Accident begins in Berlin during the 1930s and follows sad sack Egon Loeser, who’s less worried about the Nazis than the fact that, even in the free-love Weimar era, no one will have sex with him. He’s so desperate to get laid that he follows his crush, Adele, from Brecht’s Berlin to Hemingway’s Paris to Dietrich’s Hollywood. Oh, and he’s also investigating the mystery of a teleportation device. (Long story.) This fizzy novel is a great time machine all its own, jumping between the Renaissance and the future, flirting with noir, sci-fi, and romance, and skewering the “same empty people going to the same empty parties” along the way. Every generation gets the hipster satire it deserves. But this one’s for every generation. A
