We meet in the green and peaceful dear Maine S. King, Jake, a quiet English teacher. Jake hand to buy a burger in her favorite sandwich shop when he realizes that his owner, Al, seems to have aged considerably in one day. Al, who will soon die, entrusted him his secret: his storeroom leads in the past. At 11:58 am, a day of very specific 1958. And Al would love Jake leads his great project: to go into the past and live up to neutralize Lee Oswald before he killed Kennedy.
The first trip to the past takes place at the end of the first chapter and from that moment, I was completely caught up in the story. This is both entertaining (every time you back through the storage room, there resets the story, and when the character returns in the past, he must replay the scenes as in Groundhog Day) and tragic (the characters Jake and forget the past if he forgets something, it can have catastrophic consequences).
The fantastic is light: the narrative is essentially as often with King, a human story, in this case a beautiful love story. Despite this slight touch fantastic (but insistent, for delivering a component of the future in the past may help to disrupt the time), I did not see the time passing. As Jake, one marvels of this return to the past. We also laments, seeing racial segregation to the bathroom or to a much lesser extent the reign of the cigarette. But ultimately there is little difference with 2011: "people pay more for gasoline-have and more buttons to push Otherwise, it's about the same.".
We also discover, as usual, the colorful characters (the female characters seemed to me particularly successful and significant). And there are the usual foibles of S. King: a main character writer in his spare time, the old city of Derry (who for all these books has seen green and not ripe), clowning around children as in It The tabasseur husband, madness, monster ...
Ultimately, it is the story that was supposed to be the most important, that to stop the JFK assassination, the less interested me (but I imagine many must "talk" to US readers and seems monstrously documented). Fortunately for me, she arrives late and briefly first. This book is especially personal journey of a man, the story of love and renunciation necessary. That made 15 years that I had not read a S. King, I read it as voraciously as his other books when I was a teenager and I was very moved more by the end. I remembered his books were entertaining and imaginative, but I do not remember that they also spoke good to the human heart.
(Read in English)
