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.