Hans Magnus Enzensberger Wo warst Du, Robert? Hanser, August 1998. 280 pp. ISBN 3-446-19447-9 The past, reflects fifteen-year old Robert, is a distant country, and he is stranded there by a curious quirk of his eyesight: as he looks at a picture, he finds himself in the scene depicted. A glimpse of a TV documentary takes him to Stalin's Soviet Union in 1956, where the contents of his pockets, including a little calculator, bring him under suspicion of spying. A film seen in Moscow transports him to Australia in 1946, whence the accidental glimpse of an old photograph takes him back to his own home town in Germany - but in 1930. Norway in 1860 is followed - by way of a yellowed engraving in the cabin of a ship on which he has stowed away - by the court of Herrenlinden in 1702, where he becomes a page to young Princess Sophie Amalie and is taken under the wing of an Enlightenment philosopher with the pleasing name of Treibnitz. Soon he is engulfed in the horrors of the Thirty Years War, where a man very like his old school friend Ratibor is leader of a robber band. Trapped in a burning house, he passes, through the subject of a Dutch interior scene, to Amsterdam in 1621. Here, realising that his only escape is through a picture of the future which he alone can paint, he apprentices himself to an artist. He learns the skills to paint from memory his own twentieth-century kitchen and so travels forward in time and gets safely home. The eminent poet and man of letters Hans Magnus Enzensberger has written a magnificently complex and imaginatively satisfying fantasy, worthy to stand beside such classics of the genre as Philippa Pearce's Tom's Midnight Garden, Michael Ende's The never-ending Story, and Philip Pulman's Northern Lights, and like them will be enjoyed by both young people and adults. The idea of the young hero's method of time travel, nightmarish in its apparently inexorable backward progress, is genuinely original, and the historical backgrounds are superb. Robert himself makes an engaging protagonist. Utterly baffled in the opening Russian episode, he soon learns how to find out not just where he is but when he is, and by the end can fend for himself very resourcefully. A fascinating read, full of lively incident, and with strong potential appeal in the English-speaking world.