The Internet Book Database of Fiction

#	Date	Publisher	Binding	Cover
1	1978-00-00	Doubleday

Blurb:: Synopsis by Michael Battaglia at Amazon:

In this story, a borderline madman named Kemper has postulated that time is sort of wobbly and only by having people recreate the lives of certain influential famous people, can history and the present survive. That said, for whatever reason people take that advice to heart and after his death an institute is set up to recruit people to go back in time and basically live out the lives of famous people in history. The main character is forced to relive the life of Beethoven, who wasn't a real cheerful guy to begin with. To make it worse, he hates music, is tone deaf and is basically miserable, but he continues out of a sense of duty, following his instructions to make sure everything stays the same. What follows is Malzberg's skewering of staid thought processes and the idea that everything has to stay the same, culminating in a revolution of sorts. The point isn't explicit, but the novel is viciously funny in a dour sort of way, moving along in quick bursts of chapters as the character tries to figure out what the whole point of this is.