I read this book years ago and loved it. Just read it again - still love it. It is such an idiosyncratic piece, so smart and funny and well written, and so filled with a love of ideas, words, objects and people. The level of research required to paint this detailed a picture of pre-Revolutionary France is astonishing.The cast of characters is wonderful - Claude, the young country boy whose dream is to make a mechanical talking head, his first patron, the defrocked Jesuit Abbe whose love of all knowledge inspired Claude and who taught him the arts of enameling watch cases with erotic images, then automating the images with clockworks. Those he meets after he leaves the Abbe - the Gourmand coachman, the taxidermist neighbor, the lovely young wet-nurse who becomes his wife, and the only villain - Livre, the controlling hypochondriac bookseller who takes Claude as his apprentice and does his best to ruin his life.The structure of the book echoes the structure of the Case - a set of compartments, each illuminating a period in Claude's life. The detail and description of such subjects as Claude's attempt to annotate all of the sounds he hears, his mechanical experiments and the 18th century fascination with machines in general and automata especially are truly wonderful. I will probably read it again.
This is the kind of novel I always enjoy - historic fiction with an overt structure that makes overt the traits of historic fiction. I love the conceit of the work with each section of the case assigned an object, especially as you don't always understand the relationship of the section to the object until the end. The structure never feels forced and I often forgot it until I'd get to the end of a section. Likewise, I forgot the sort of author's wink at the beginning and end as I was reading, until it came back in as a wink. The characters are appealing and the historic facts are the kind that make you want to research how "true" they are. This is the kind of pleasure reading that almost always makes me want to research to put everything in context. Definitely an author to put on my "to read" list!
What do You think about A Case Of Curiosities (2001)?
From my Summer Reading List blog post (May, 2012) Allen Kurzweil – The Case of Curiosities: Occasionally a book will manage to amaze you with just the sheer brilliance of the author’s complex imagination, the depth of knowledge revealed between the pages, the artistry of storytelling. The Case of Curiosities is just such a book. Set in 18th century France, this is less an historical novel than a detailed portrait of a life where every daub of paint is both vivid and fascinating. An entertaining and sometimes hilarious read.
—Beth
Claude Page, a bright and talented boy from a remote village in the French Pyranees, receives local mentorship which changes the course of his life and brings him to Paris during the French Revolution. While I never quite understood his obsession with creating a mechanical talking head, I like to believe I received from this book accurate information as to the state of science and engineering from that period. This novel came to my list via Nancy Pearl's Book Lust reading list "Mechanical Men, Robots, Automatons, and Deep Blue", and was also mentioned by the author's cousin Ray Kurzweil in his book The Singularity Is Near.
—Ronald Wise
I didn't finish this book. (4-11-08) I've read the first 34 pages and liked them and the interesting development of character, but I read the back of the book (something I usually avoid to not spoil part of the book) and discovered that Claude "apprentices himself to a pornographic bookseller, and applies his erotic erudition to the seduction of the wife of an impotent wigmaker." If anyone has read this book and it's not as bad as it sounds let me know and I'll finish it. His children's books are wonderful, I hadn't imagined that his adult books would be inappropriate. I'm disappointed. Oh well
—Robin
