The Grand Complication: A Novel

by Allen Kurzweil

Book Overview

Alexander Short is a stylish young reference librarian. With his job in jeopardy and his marriage coming apart, Alexander meets the improbably named Henry James Jesson III, a book-lover who hires the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0786866039
• Release Date: August 2001
• Publisher: Hyperion
• Length: 360 Pages
• Weight: 1.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.5" x 1.3" x 6.8"

Customer Reviews

Librarians and watchmakers in a wild rumpus!

Kurzweil is simply masterful in his portrayal of the librarian psyche. Alexander Short is so very like myself and so many of my librarian colleagues and the explication of our eccentricities is as droll as it is on target. The plot is deliciously complicated and the whole thing is simply a pleasure to read. Heady fiction for smart people. Can't wait for another. The comparisons to Fowles, Eco, Calvino, Kundera, Voltaire, Rabelais, and Thackeray are all right on too. A wonderful diversion from current events.

An intellectual mystery which does not lose its audience.

Alexander Short is a young librarian--precise and studious, with a need to catalogue and record, and on his way to becoming stuffy. But he was not always this way. His courtship and marriage to his French wife Nic, who designs pop-up books, was romantic--and spontaneous enough to have earned him a reprimand from the head of the library for his enthusiastic acceptance of her proposal on the library's electronic bulletin board. Now the marriage is in trouble, his career seems to have hit a snag, and he's holding himself and his life together by recording and alphabetizing his life experiences in a notebook he has attached to his waist. Into his life comes Henry James Jesson III, an elderly man in search of an object missing from a hidden compartment in an 18th century furniture case he owns. Short is enlisted to help in the search, and his life is suddenly turned upside down. The book, and the research behind it, took the author ten years, and one of the greatest compliments I can pay is to say that it doesn't show. So smoothly does Kurzweil integrate all the esoteric details of compartmented antique furniture, 18th century watchmaking, library cataloguing and conservation procedures, the intricacies of fine art theft, and even Japanese irezumi tattooing, that it all feels right and appropriate, and not at all pretentious. His themes of order vs. spontaneity, life vs. stasis, permanence vs. change mesh perfectly with the search for a missing timepiece, which is what belongs in Jesson's case--a watch called The Grand Complication, which was originally commissioned by Marie Antoinette. The book's structure mirrors the intricacies of this mysterious watch, which was stolen.. As Short and Jesson conduct their search, the reader is, by turns, entertained, enlightened, and thoroughly engaged. Alexander Short is a character who comes to life, as, to a lesser extent, does Jesson, who is a sad case, not unlike his furniture piece, missing something necessary for personal completion. The library itself comes to life so fully that it almost becomes a character itself. The book is full of puns and literary allusions, which add yet another level of fun. With a terrific, bang-up conclusion which ties up all the loose ends of the plot, the characters' lives, and the themes, Kurzweil leaves his reader fully satisfied--and hoping not to have to wait ten more years for his next novel. Mary Whipple

A delicious complication

Learned, lean and lots of fun - I thoroughly enjoyed this book. An erudite page-turner, Kurzeil's unique voice is a pleasure. This is the perfect beach book for someone who doesn't want to put their mind on vacation.

A Star is Reborn

I love this book. To me it demonstrates a mind working the language at full capacity, with loads of linguistic twists and turns, puns, riddles, and more. The setting of the book is really the mind, specifically the mind of the librarian. It is a book for people who love books in every way, who enjoy holding them almost as much as they enjoy reading them. Henry James Jesson III is one of the characters, and he is someone who revels in his own acquired knowledge. The book's protagonist,Alexander Short, loves the fact that Jesson is an intellectual/literary show off, and he falls under Jesson's spell.I suppose that at its heart the book is a sort of intellectual thriller, with mysteries inside mysteries.Where is Marie Antoinette's stolen timepiece, The Grand Complication? Does it really exist? Is it what is learned along the chase that is as interesting to the protagonists as finding the watch? I also love the fact that it refers back to the author's previous novel, A Case of Curiosities, without in any way being a sequel.This is the kind of novel I love to read during those luxurious-feeling summer moments.

A different kind of mystery, rich and complex

Reference librarian Alex Short finds work very boring as assisting customers is done more on an assembly line with pneumatic tubes than on a one-to-one basis. He enjoys lettering and on rare occasions, a customer's call slip is written in a historical style of graphics and he collects these rarities with a passion. The young man prefers to "girdle" by writing observations in his little notebook that he carries with him all the time more than he wants to have sex with his beautiful French wife. Sixtyish Henry James Jesson III submits a library call slip requesting Secret Compartments, an eighteenth century furniture book. The beautiful rarely seen-today writing style catches Alex's eye and he breaks the rules by delivering the book to the requester. Henry offers Alex a job to complete a collection that contains a secret compartment with a hanging nail inside but the attached item is missing. Henry begins to follow the trail of THE GRAND COMPLICATION, a lost eighteenth century watch, and a search that could prove to cost him his soul. THE GRAND COMPLICATION is a different type of mystery one that seems so simple yet is so rich and complex. The library, Nic's pop-ups, eighteenth century cabinets to conserve precious items, and Henry's Manhattan townhouse are filled with layers of detail weaved into the delightful story line. The investigation is intelligent and adds to the strange relationship between Henry and Alex. Readers who delight in well-written, off beat literature will want to obtain Allen Kurzweil's first novel in a decade because few writers enter the soul of his characters quite like this author does.Harriet Klausner