I'm a sucker for Nancy Perl's book talks and this is one I heard her do on NPR--in fact, while at the annual library conference in DC this June, I was on a tour of NPR and actually got to watch the beginning of the interview she did with Steve Inskeep in which she reviewed this book. You can read her well wrought and much more plot-informative preview here. The Grand Complication by Alan Kurzweil was well worth the read and the most succinct description I can provide is that it's very clever. Not only does this story about a watch end exactly on page 360 (as in degrees!) but its protagonist is an obsessive compulsive reference librarian. Not that this would recommend it to everyone, and sometimes it's not even enough for me; however, this novel offered stories within stories (one character's family crest includes a book within a book), and deceit upon deceit. The cleverness ranges from the bawdy to the sublime, or to put it another way, from humor that will be apparent to all--to insider librarian humor (no that is not an oxymoron). On one end we have the crucial clue ostensibly tattooed on someone's butt and the dialogue goes like this, "So all this time Kucko's been sitting on the evidence? Cheeky bastard." At the other end, when Zander (our librarian protagonist) "borrows" a book from the conservation room of the library, he replaces it with one of equal weight so the loss won't immediately be apparent; the replacement item is a tome on bibliokleptomania. When one character tells Zander that he can't return the book because he's sent it out to have the boards repaired, our librarian whines that the conservator "keeps a detailed condition log. He's bound to notice." Anyway, if these puns are too obscure, there will still be plenty to engage and entertain you.
1 comment:
What I'm enjoying so much about your blog is that it is a comfortable type of Review of Books - what do I mean comfortable? well, I can imagine myself reading these books! Unlike some reviews where I know I would never ever read the book being critiqued. Though I will say that I taught myself to write - even began to consider that I could write - by reading the NYT book review and absorbing ideas. That led to my first freelance writing job, as poetry editor for Southern Oregon Currents, where I selected poems for a weekly column and wrote a profile of the poet. It was great fun. My only mistake was in not acquiring from the poets rights for publishing the poems in an anthology. But I have my own personal copy of all the columns. That's how I began to know the poets of Oregon. I also wrote book reviews for the Grants Pass Daily Courier and other papers - fun, even though very little pay ($10 plus the book in some cases). I wrote the sort of review like this article about OSU's Wendy Madar and her new mystery: Wendy Madar [hope the link works!]. Doesn't this make you want to read the book!
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