A Case of Curiosities
A Novel
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3.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
This tale of an ambitious inventor in France as the Revolution looms is “brilliantly playful . . . full of lore and lewdness” (Chicago Tribune).
“A portrait of a young mechanical genius in 18th-century France, delivered along with a gallimaufry of odd and intriguing facts and a rich, lusty picture of society in that time and place.” —Publishers Weekly
In France, on the eve of the Revolution, a young man named Claude Page sets out to become the most ingenious and daring inventor of his time. Over the course of a career filled with violence and passion, Claude learns the arts of enameling and watchmaking from an irascible, defrocked abbé, then apprentices himself to a pornographic bookseller and applies his erotic erudition to the seduction of the wife of an impotent wigmaker.
But it is Claude’s greatest device—a talking mechanical head—that both crowns his career and leads to an execution as tragic as that of Marie Antoinette, and far more bizarre.
“Like a joint effort by Henry Fielding and John Barth” (Chicago Tribune), this “captivating novel” (San Francisco Chronicle) marked the debut of one of the finest literary artists of our time.
“A Case of Curiosities . . . really is brilliant. Also witty, learned, ingenious, sly, and bawdy.” —Entertainment Weekly
“What John Fowles did for the 19th century with The French Lieutenant’s Woman and Umberto Eco did for the 14th with The Name of the Rose . . . Kurzweil now does for the late 18th century.” —San Francisco Chronicle
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
