Books by author: Allen Kurzweil

A Case of Curiosities was Allen Kurzweil's first novel. It's a rock-solid piece of literary fiction, set in the eighteenth century and centered on a young boy named Claude Page. Claude starts the novel at the hands of a conniving surgeon and ends it at the hands of a French mob. Along the way, he develops a wide range of artistic and scientific skills, which ultimately lead to an invention that could be his downfall. His friends and colleagues are a colorful bunch, ranging from a secretive mentor, to a despicable seller of pornographic books, a taxidermist, and a free-thinking coach driver.

As with The Grand Complication, his other novel, Kurzweil's writing here is structured in a very contrived way that he is careful to point out at the very end. I'm actually a bit of a fan of this kind of structure (minus the shoving-your-nose-in-it finish), as long as it's done well (which in this case it mostly is) and doesn't stand in the way of telling a good story. The prose itself is often clever; Kurweil is pretty good at wordplay, and he isn't afraid to show it.

I'm not completely enamored with Kurzweil's writing, but I'll certainly keep a lookout for his future novels. WIth his first two, he's off to a good start.

I received both The Grand Complication and A Case of Curiosities for Christmas, and I glanced them over quickly before choosing Complication as my first exposure to Allen Kurzweil. I had no way of knowing this when I made my decision, but it turns out that the book I chose is a sequel of sorts to the one I passed over; the book I neglected is actually a character of sorts in the one I selected (and in a very meta way, one character in the present book is projected back into the other novel). Confused? Don't be...it makes sense when you read it.

Kurzweil is a bit of a pedant, but in an endearing way. His protagonist, Alexander Short, is a librarian who is slightly eccentric (this is true of all good librarians, right?). His quirks include constantly taking cryptic notes in a book attached to his waist, and his interests include secret compartments. When he is contracted by a curious older man to help find a missing objet d'art, the reader is drawn into an unorthodox mystery. About two thirds of the way through the 360 pages of the novel proper, Kurzweil bogs down, but he recovers with a couple of satisfying twists, and the ending is apropos.

Kurzweil's prose is quirky, but with good reason. The characters are strange but consistent, and there is clearly a lot of scholarship behind the story itself. I'm very curious to read another of his novels to make a comparison.