Review
By the author of A Case of Curiosities, this is a delightfully entertaining novel full of weird things. Alexander Short, the narrator, is a stylish young reference librarian with unusual interests - he is fascinated by enclosed spaces and making lists. Alex is approached in the library where he works by Henry James Jesson III, a bibliophile who asks Alex to work for him in his spare time doing research. His main task is to put together an incomplete cabinet of wonders which details the life of a mysterious 18th-century inventor. A truly funny, genuinely eccentric and imaginative tale.
The hero of Allen Kurzweil's self-consciously literate novel is a young and obsessive librarian, Alexander Short. He carries around a notebook in which he diligently records (or 'girdles') an inventory of everyone and everything he encounters. His marriage, to a French designer and devotee of pop-up books, is on the rocks. Into his life comes Henry James Jesson III, an elegant and elderly bibliophile who seems to have stepped from another age. Henry wants Alexander to find a rare Breguet watch (the Grand Complication of the title) the acquisition of which will complete a cabinet of antique curios Jesson owns. Before he knows it, Alexander is drawn into the old man's elaborately constructed intrigue, and finds himself stealing books from the library where he works. The obvious reference point for this would-be detective story is The Name of the Rose. Both are set in a labyrinthine world of antiquarian books, display a love of the arcane and esoteric, and boast a supporting cast of rogues and eccentrics. This novel is a patchier work than Eco's masterpiece - it is easy to believe in the friendship that springs up between the two men, both of whom possess a Bernard Levin-like devotion to the printed word, but the characterization of Nic, Alexander's wife, is thinner, while the detailed descriptions of the Dewey System and other fine points of library procedure belong in a handbook, not a novel. However, this is an ingenious and entertaining work which will be enjoyed by all who care for books and libraries. (Kirkus UK)
Kirkus
‘A deliciously mazelike house of fiction … Every bit as entertaining as it is sophisticated and elusive.’
