A Case of Curiosities - Hardcover

Kurzweil, Allen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0151157936 ISBN 13: 9780151157938

Publisher: Harcourt, 1992

Synopsis

After acquiring the skills of an expert enamelist and watchmaker as a child in preindustrial Europe, Claude Page flees to Paris and struggles with the help of friends to invent his greatest device

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Reviews

The imaginative story spun here by first novelist Kurzweil is in itself a curious melange: a portrait of a young mechanical genius, a gallimaufry of odd and intriguing facts, and a rich, lusty picture of late 18th-century French society. A kindly, heretical abbe recognizes country lad Claude Page's skill for drawing. Under his mentor's tutelege, Claude discovers capacities for scientific inquiry, watchmaking and painting erotic scenes in miniature. But his genius is denied expression when he impulsively runs away to Paris and apprentices to a loathsome bookseller and dealer in pornography. The events that lead to the blossoming of Claude's talents are related by Kurzweil in leisurely prose animated by irony, humor and aphoristic asides. Nuggets of arcane knowledge are neatly interpolated into the story, and there are whimsical facts, too; we learn, for example, that kurzweil means "pastime" in German. The author is most successful, however, in creating a gallery of memorable, Dickensian characters. The bawdy inhabitants of Paris's fetid slums are depicted with affection, in contrast to the hypocritical, pretentious members of the upper class, who are unaware that the Revolution lurks around the corner. Though Claude's most brilliant invention, the "Talking Turk," falls victim to that cataclysm, he leaves to posterity a "case of curiosities": a construction called a momentum hominum , "the chronicle of a life. " In this diverting novel, his inventor does the same. BOMC and QPB selections; major ad/promo.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This odd first novel, set in 18th-century Europe, begins with the removal of an unusual mole (a collector's item for the surgeon) and ends with one ingenious mechanical object (a Talking Head) being severed by another (a guillotine): things, in other words, get as much play as people in a novel that sometimes reads more like a museum tour. Every tour needs a guide, and so we have an arch, long-winded, mock-erudite narrative voice to tell us the story of Claude Page of Tournay, Switzerland. It is 1780 when the ten-year-old Claude loses his mole (and middle finger); the valley's biggest landowner, the self-styled Abb‚, is so shocked by the gratuitous amputation that he moves Claude into his mansion house, giving him a challenging if haphazard education, and part-time work enameling pornographic watchcases for Parisian clients. The relationship (it's the only real one here) between eccentric benefactor and respectful prot‚g‚ ends abruptly when Claude believes he has witnessed the Abb‚ murdering a female harpsichord student. (Only much later does he learns that the Abb‚ was destroying his own flawed handiwork, a mechanical puppet: ``what collectors of curiosa...called ein Kurzweil. A pastime.'') Claude lights out for Paris, becomes apprenticed to an unpleasant bookseller (the agent for the watchcases), and is seduced (unsexily) by a wealthy customer out slumming for a ``little peasant boy''; but picaresque adventure is always secondary to Claude's mechanical projects, which culminate in the much-exhibited Talking Head, a costly venture financed by an aristocrat who insists the Head declare Vive le Roi--hence, its post-Revolutionary rendezvous with the guillotine. A leaden exercise that (unlike, say, Patrick S�skind's Perfume, another recent journey into 18th-century France) opens no new windows into the past. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

The narrator buys a box of randomly assembled objects at a Paris auction. It is a life box, the memento hominem of Claude Page, an extraordinarily gifted 18th-century French clockmaker with a passion for the mechanical and a great zest for life. As a young man, he is taken in by a God-hating abbe who employs him to paint naughty scenes, with moving parts, on the faces of watches and clocks. "The tree of knowledge is there for us to climb," counsels his mentor. "Climb it. Ignore the fences. Swing from branch to branch . . . . You, Claude, are a discoverer." In Paris, later, Claude struggles to construct a fabulous talking automaton, with which he hopes to earn his fortune. But fortune has a different plan for Claude. The eccentrics and bohemians who touch Claude's life are one and all grotesques of compelling interest and comic force. Kurzweil tells a real story; it is funny, human, and exciting all at once. Highly recommended for general collections. BOMC and Quality Paperback selections; previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 9/1/91.
- David Keymer, SUNY Inst. of Technology, Utica
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Harcourt
• Publication date: 1992
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0151157936
• ISBN 13: 9780151157938
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 358