Another book I really wanted to love, but that fell short of expectations. The story and the idea of the story was really good - the execution, not so much. I felt that the characters were a bit ingenuine and overimportant. For example, I'm convinced the women characters were depicted rather maliciously, rather than an attempt to reflect the time of sexual liberation that the main character grew up in (and the women were "discovering." You might have to have read it to understand what I mean.) I understand that a novel involving time travel can often get confusing with chronology but mixing that among too many significant main characters creating too many substories and too much confusion to make the story flow well. The setting of 1897 Vienna was darkly beautiful and since I'm new to that time/place, I was still drawn to the story and how it unfolded into the 20th century. Perhaps this might have been one of the first instances in which I felt the author might have just spent a little too much time working on his story.