The Grand Complication: A Novel - Softcover

Kurzweil, Allen

3.24

791 ratings by Goodreads

9780786885183: The Grand Complication: A Novel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0786885181 ISBN 13: 9780786885183

Publisher: Hyperion, 2002

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Critically acclaimed for his international bestseller, A Case of Curiosities, Allen Kurzweil has been called one of today's most gifted new voices in fiction. Now he returns with The Grand Complication -- a modern-day tale of literary intrigue, deviant passions, and delicious secrets. Behind the majestic walls of a Manhattan town house, a stylish young reference librarian of arcane interests unravels an 18th-century mystery -- who stole Marie Antoinette's watch The book is a grand and complicated "timepiece," told with a devilish sense of fun.

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Review:

Penzler Pick, August 2001: Most avid readers love everything about books--not only the words, but also the paper, the edition, the age, the texture of the binding, all of which become part of the fascination for the printed word that makes a true bibliophile. So it is no wonder that the bibliophile mystery has achieved such popularity. The Grand Complication, well-written and well-researched, is the latest in a long line of such mysteries.

Alexander Short is a reference librarian who spends his days dealing with the minutiae of his work world. At night he goes home to his French wife who is also a book person. She makes pop-up books and other three-dimensional volumes, including a "girdle" that Alexander wears in the manner of medieval monks, tied around his middle and used for his "girdling" or taking notes--something Alexander does obsessively, to the detriment of his job. Two such people seem made for each other, but their obsessions make for a rocky marriage.

So Alexander is fascinated when he meets Henry James Jesson III, an elderly man with equally obsessive interests. He would like Alexander to help him after hours. In Jesson's Manhattan mansion there is a cabinet of curiosities that tell the life of an 18th-century inventor. But one of the compartments is empty. Jesson, and soon Alexander, are agog with curiosity about what was in that compartment. Finding out is half the fun of reading this book.

The other half, if you care (and somehow I think you do), is the design of the book itself. Kurzweil is the son of an engineer, and he designed the small icon, a gear, that appears on many of the book's pages. Over the course of the novel, which runs 360 pages, that gear turns 360 degrees. And then there are the endpapers.... --Otto Penzler

About the Author:

Allen Kurzweil has won various awards for his fiction, including fellowships from the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He is currently a Fellow at Brown University's John Nicholas Brown Center. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island, with his wife and son.

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