What is time?
If you do not ask me… I know.
If you ask me… I do not know (said Saint Augustine).
Time is the substance of which we are made (said Borges).
Time is the child of the heavens (said the Greeks, and as the Big Bang corroborated).
Time has the form of a disc, as the young protagonists of the novel, The Disc of Time,
Nuria, Phillippe and Marco will discover.
The author, Maria García Esperón, has been awarded the National Prize in children's
and juvenile literature for 2004 and the book has just appeared in the red series of the collection
"El barco de vapor" in a collaborative edition of Conaculta and Ediciones SM.
Time is a disc through which one can travel, so readers will discover when they come upon a mysterious
find in the pages of this novel: The disc of Phaistos.
Phaistos is an ancient city on the Isle of Crete. Since the disc's discovery in 1908, in the ruins of the
Phaistos palace, this artifact has unsettled the imagination and intelligence of archeologists and scholars
of ancient Greek writings.
The disc of Phaistos carries a special message composed of signs, which although most are recognizable,
others still await the audacious intelligence and privileged imagination which will decipher them.
The scholars perplexedly after decades of study still skeptically shrug their shoulders.
They conclude that the disc cannot be deciphered. However, as a counterpoint to this pessimism the curiosity
and enthusiasm of the novel's three young protagonists arises.
Phillippe, from France, who actually maintains an internet site dedicated to the disc of Phaistos
http://disque.phaistos.free.fr); Nuria, a young Mexican information student and Marco, an aspiring historian.
These three find themselves embroiled in the adventure of a lifetime: to decode the message written into the disc
of Phaistos using the information and the resources available on the internet.
Supported by their 21st century computer hard drives, they research the study of the hard clay disc dated
from the 17th century B.C.E.
Intent on deciphering it, they discover that the Disc of Phaistos is a kind of thinking machine machine -like a book-
An exercise in freedom -like a book-
A possibility for multiple readings -like a book.
But these are words that can not be read -for the moment- and they contain a relentless message that has
lain dormant for more than three thousand years as a result of the loss of its deciphering codes,
its functional laws -and it is a message warning of dangers.
It will be Nuria who will make the pertinent discovery of a mechanism for time travel (once again, like a book).
However, the Disc of Time is not a novel about time travel; it is an approximation of the structure of this mystery
which lacerated Saint Augustine and of which we are so intimately constituted.
It imbues us with a yearning for that beautiful moment which has just passed without our fully experiencing
it while we struggled o understand it.
And so, from the first lines of this novel, time begins to run ant it runs like a river from the past to the
present and it runs like a river from the present to the past. As they begin to read, the young protagonists
and readers alike, set into motion the mechanism of the Disc of Time.
The ancient truths begin to operate as they are read, as they are revealed.
Minos, the King and Pasifae, the Queen, Daedalus, the architect, the princess Ariadne, the hero Theseus,
and the terrible Minotaur, all begin to live again through the disc of Phaistos.
But the Minotaur is not as he is portrayed, and this is discovered by protagonists and readers as they find
their own Ariadne's thread, and emerge from the labyrinth that is the Disc of Time more than conquerors, enlightened.
