A Case of Curiosities - (Harvest Book) by Allen Kurzweil (Paperback)

About the Book

A young inventor in preindustrial Europe constructs his greatest device, a masterpiece that proves to be his downfall, leading to an execution as tragic as that of Marie Antoinette and one that is much more bizarre. This debut work is a national bestseller, now available in paperback.

Book Synopsis

In France, on the eve of the Revolution, a young man named Claude Page sets out to become the most ingenious and daring inventor of his time. In the course of a career filled with violence and passion, Claude learns the arts of enameling and watchmaking from an irascible, defrocked abbé, apprentices himself to a pornographic bookseller, and applies his erotic erudition to the seduction of the wife of an impotent wigmaker. But it is Claude's greatest device-a talking mechanical head-that both crowns his career and leads to an execution as tragic as that of Marie Antoinette, and far more bizarre.

Hailed by critics for the shimmering brilliance of its inventions and its uncanny fidelity to the textures of the past, A Case of Curiosities places

Allen Kurzweil securely in the ranks of the finest literary artists of our time.

Review Quotes

PRAISE FOR" A CASE OF CURIOSITIES"
"What John Fowles did for the 19th century with The French Lieutenant's Woman and Umberto Eco did for the 14th with The Name of the Rose . . . Kurzweil now does for the late 18th century with A Case of Curiosities. [A] captivating novel."-San Francisco Chronicle


"Brilliantly playful . . . More like a joint effort by Henry Fielding and John Barth, it is clever indeed but also riotous, melodramatic and erotic, full of lore and lewdness and crackling with ideas and exhilarated imagination."-Chicago Tribune