![]() He has been many things in many times because, by the strictest of definitions, Hazard isn't really a time traveler either - he's just lived a very, very long time. ![]() And all of that might have been very annoying if he hadn't also been, well, not an aluminum siding salesman exactly, but just a regular guy. ![]() He's been in rooms with Josephine Baker and Lillian Gish. Worked for him, playing the lute for his productions. In How To Stop Time, the new novel from Matt Haig, the main character, Tom Hazard (which, not for nothing, is a fantastic name for a time traveler - or anyone else) knew Shakespeare. No one ever remembers the past life where they were the second-most-successful aluminum siding salesman in Columbus, Ohio. It's like people who believe they can recall past lives: They always seem to have been Napoleon or Cleopatra. Sometimes this is the purpose of the time travel ( Let's kill Hitler! being such a famous occupation of the chronologically gifted that it has spawned its own sub-genre of semi-historical fiction) and sometimes it's just a pleasant diversion, but it always seems to happen. Hitler, Jesus, Shakespeare, the king of this or that. In (almost) every single one of them, the time traveler's most notable experience is meeting other people who aren't time travelers who were, in their proper moment, just famous as all hell. Here's what drives me crazy about time travel books. ![]() Your purchase helps support NPR programming. ![]() Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title How to Stop Time Author Matt Haig ![]()
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