Rating: 
Summary: Brought to vibrant life with rapturous imagination
Review: The genesis for Allen Kurzweil's thriller that is The Grand Complication lies within a true story told to the author, of a stolen pocket watch masterpiece made by Abraham-Louis Breguet, a French-Swiss craftsman of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. To learn the history of the missing watch, author Kurzweil spent five years of research and travel, from a private museum in Jerusalem to Switzerland, Paris, and the Isle of Man. Filled with passion, drama, intrigue, and danger, The Grand Complications follows protagonist Alexander Short, who through a series of crises gets involved in a trail of clues that point to the missing watch, though the complications of his relationships and the motives of the one who hired him hover ominously. Meticulously researched, yet brought to vibrant life with rapturous imagination, The Grand Complication is not to be missed.
Rating: 
Summary: Gimmicky, self-conscious, sloppy and silly
Review: Caveat: I read for characters, not necessarily ones I like, but people who interest me, whose complexities, problems, cares and peculiarities are worthy of a novel-long narrative. This book's characters aren't people, they're cartoons, and badly drawn ones at that. The whole girdling thing, for instance, is just one of those annoying tics third-rate novelists give their protagonists, hoping it'll make them seem interesting and eccentric without actually having to create a three(or even two)-dimensional character. This book was so tedious and obvious I couldn't even finish it and I'm mad that I bought it.
Rating:
Summary: Uncomfortably Complicated
Review: If the complications in the book had arisen naturally, and with grander ease in linguistic gymnastics, it might have been worth reading. Instead, it's a sophomoric attempt at "literature," vaguely pawing at intellectualism with feeble concepts and atrocious, thesaural language. The vocabulary reads as though a computer program scanned it and automatically replaced each word with its longest counterpart, regardless of nuances in meaning.Kurzweil should write what he's comfortable writing, not what is obviously well beyond his limits. And boos to the editor who accepted this, too.
Rating:
Summary: The Grand Mess
Review: Allen Kurzwell's book The Grand Complication, may be the worst book I have read in years. It has almost no plot, paper thin characters, and a stupid ending. Mostly it is a forum for AK to use arcane words and gab about library science. In short it is really a grand mess and should be avoided.
Rating:
Summary: A mundane complication
Review: My interest in this book was sparked by a review on NPR's Fresh Air. Being a library addict, I looked forward to reading a book about books.
This book starts off with a bang and whimpers to a slow painful ending. It reminded me of other books on the same theme - the search for The Maltese Falcon, the mind games and symbolism in John Fowles' The Magus.
Unfortunately, it disappoints on both counts - the search for "The Grand Complication" is not very engrossing and the "games" the protagonists play with each other border on the verge of childish.
The inside story of how libraries work is fascinating but can't hold the different pieces of the story together.
Rating: 
Summary: Fun but No Payoff
Review: This novel is right up my alley. It is the story of young librarian, Alexander Short, caught up in a search for a timepiece to complete a collection owned by a wealthy eccentric, Henry James Jesson III. Books, library searches, heraldry, theft, adventure and a wife who is constantly trying to seduce her husband. Who could ask for more? And, indeed, this is a fun little book. I am particularly fond of the scenes set in the New York Public Library with its resources and its cast of interesting characters. I also find the search for the timepiece to be an interesting one with plenty of twists and turns along the way. My only complaint about this book is the payoff. There really isn't one. I found that the book just kind of fizzled out in the last few pages. I have not read Kurzweil's first novel, A Case of Curiosities. I wish I had. I get the impression it might throw some light on this novel. Still, as it is, it's a quick novel and well worth a read.
Rating:
Summary: I was warned.
Review: A reviewer for NPR damned with faint praise, but still piqued my curiosity. My mistake. The best news is, this is a very fast read. Briefly: neat premise, weak execution. Any comparison to Eco is laughably, even offensively, absurd. Character development is astonishingly weak for what seems like an attempt at physchological drama. If the male characters are under-developed, the women are utterly objectified -- sometimes quite literally. Nikki, arguably the most interesting character, is treated with shallowness throughout and finally unceremoniously discarded when the protagonist's not-so-ambiguous-as-intended sexuality ceases to be relevant. By the end, the reliance on tired self-referential technical tricks is merely irksome and I wished for a hasty conclusion. Mercifully, that's what I got. The pagination ploy of the protagonist-cum-author (or vice versa?) is the final outrage and doesn't seem so amusing under Klieg lights. Some things are been better left for the reader to discover. This was 'ok' for the beach, but it won't get space on my shelf. But give the author his due; judge for yourself.
Rating: 
Summary: disappointing
Review: Maybe the hype surrounding being named one of Granta's Best American Novelists Under 40 is
inherently unfair, or maybe it's just that a wait of nine years between novels raises expectations to
insupportable levels, but whatever the case, this novel is somewhat disappointing. It's not bad, it's just
overly cute, which is the last thing you'd expect somehow from a decade-long effort by a talented
young novelist. The story involves a librarian, Alexander Short, who is fascinated by calligraphy, enclosures and
compartments, Samuel Johnson, puns, the Dewey Decimal System and various other unusual subjects.
Though married (inexplicably) to a seductive French artist, Alex has become quite frigid, to the point
where he wears a notebook on a girdle, which serves something of the role of a chastity belt. In this
book he notes down (girdles) his daily encounters with anything that bears upon his topics of
fascination. Then one day an elegant older man puts in a call slip, in exquisite handwriting, asking for the book
Secret Compartments in Eighteenth-Century Furniture. In no time at all, Alex is lured into Henry
James Jesson III's own set of fascinations, in particular his search for an Abraham-Louis Breguet watch
that was designed for Marie Antoinette, the "Grand Complication" of the title. A complication is a
watch that serves additional purposes besides telling time, in this case the Grand Complication included
such functions as a thermometer scale and a perpetual calender that even corrected for leap years.
Jesson wants it because he owns a curio cabinet in which it once resided and he's filled all the cubby
holes with the objects the original owner kept there except for the one in which it sat. The search is
complicated by the fact that the watch was stolen from a Jerusalem museum some years previously,
while Alex's life is complicated by his deteriorating relationship with his wife, by run-ins with
officious library staff, and by his quickening suspicions that Jesson is not being straightforward with
him. Such is the basic set up for the book, but that's just the internal mechanism of Kurzweil's own
complication. Meanwhile, it helps to know that the Grand Complication is a real watch that was truly
stolen, that Kurzweil received a New York Public Library Research Fellowship, and, most of all, that
much of the action of this novel refers back to his first, A Case of Curiosities. That tale is told by a
narrator who seems now to have been Jesson. The book starts with him telling the reader that he's
purchased the cabinet, or "case of curiosities", and that he wants to share with us the life story of the
cabinet's creator and the meaning behind each of the items within the case. The creator turns out to
have been Claude Page, an 18th Century French watchmaker who narrowly avoided the guillotine
during the Revolution. In what seemed at the time to be little more than one more period detail, the
narrator mentioned at the end of that book that Page at one time owned the complication. Given all this as context, this new novel can be perceived as an enclosure too, the prior novel
embedded within it. The intertwining between the two becomes somewhat complicated in its own
right and the question of where Jesson and/or Alex end and Kurzweil begins comes into play.
Meanwhile though, the entire shaky structure is perched upon an uncertain foundation, the obsession of
these three men (characters) with these antique devices and the literature and ephemera of the 1700s.
In A Case of Curiosities these subjects were unfamiliar and, since the main action of the novel was set
during Page's lifetime, it seemed natural for them to be part of the story. By the end of this current
novel, the reader of both books has been subjected to over 700 pages of this stuff--that's a lot to ask
for one cabinet full of mementos. Further, Jesson and Short, because the action of this novel occurs in a contemporary setting just seem
like oddballs, their obsessions little more than affectations. At one point in the novel, Jesson says : If you ask an enthusiast of jigsaw puzzles to explain his habit, he'll tell you what he loves is the
process. Once all the pieces are in place, the puzzle retains little interest. Likewise, the reader's enjoyment of this book will depend heavily on his enthusiasm for the process,
an enthusiasm which for my part I found waning as this sequel progressed. And the finished puzzle
does hold little interest. Were Kurzweil a first time author, of whom we expected little, these weaknesses would be more easily
excused. In fact, if you approach the book just hoping for a mildly diverting literary thriller, it is
likely to be more than adequate. But fans of A Case of Curiosities seem certain to be at least
somewhat disappointed and there are troubling signs within the text that another sequel will inevitably
follow. That would be inexcusable. We'll give him this one lackluster effort, but perhaps it might be
better for Mr. Kurzweil to escape from this one cabinet and move on to some new story. GRADE : Grand Complication : C
A Case of Curiosities : B+
Rating: 
Summary: The Grandiose Ego Objectification
Review: I wanted to like this book. I heard Kurzweil on NPR and thought I would adore a novel involving libraries, pop-up erotica and a Breguet watch. I immediately ordered a copy from ... in time for vacation reading. I was disappointed in the result. The only word to describe the prose is "precious." Kurzweil is so self-consciously trying to weave esoterica together that he forgot it was a novel. No character has a believable emotion or speaks in any recognizable idiom. Believe me, I've known pedants, and not even THEY blather like the characters in this book. The whole thing seems like an excuse to indulge the author's personal interests and fantasies. For example, here's the story: mousy, secretive yet handsome librarian (AK worked in the New York public library), evidently nursing overwhelming need for a father, (AK's father dies tragically while his son is very young) is persuaded by an older, richer, and more literate and secretive man to find a watch designed for Marie Antoinette. The plot really never develops from that point. Rather, it meanders only to accomodate different discussions -- heraldry, the history of the Dewey decimal system, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Yes, some of the esoterica is enjoyable, and there are some amusing seduction scenes, but because I can't care at all about the characters and the mystery is strangely un-compelling, the novel as a whole falls flat. Not a terrible book, as Kurweil obviously has a great intellect and some sense of humor. My sense, however, is that until Kurzweil can keep his demons out of the books he's writing, he won't produce the great work he may be capable of.
Rating:
Summary: Enigmatic
Review: I don't believe a reader can fully appreciate what this writer is offering with, "The Grand Complication", unless, "A Case Of Curiosities", has been read first. I enjoyed the book as the writer is talented, and pays a great deal of attention to detail, both to his writing and the manner in which he physically presents his novel. This novel does not open with the blank pages most books do that lead a reader to wonder why they are there. He not only uses the space to enhance the aesthetics of his book, he makes it a part of his novel as well. The same can be said of the cover. More and more book covers seem to be the final resting place of bad clip art or just bad taste. Here again the Author uses every opportunity to add to his tale. What is on the cover is there for a reason; you have only to open the book to see why. I have not read the book that preceded this and I felt as though I missed out on much of the fun as the story progressed. I do not know if the Author has closed the loop with these two works, however if he has, and if you read only this fine work, as I did, the loop is incomplete. The book is not a sequel in a traditional manner. There are issues of continuity that I believe to be very clever, I will not be certain until I read the earlier book. Abraham-Louis Breguet made the watch that is the center of attention in this novel. This is a company that is celebrating its 225th Anniversary with a limited edition watch that requires as much money to posses it, as a rather substantial house. These timepieces are so intricate that elements of them can be produced to this day by only a very few companies that have the talent and the technology. Mr. Kurzweil joins an illustrious group of Authors who have used the watches of Breguet in their books, Honore de Balzac, Alexandre Dumas, Stendahl, Jules Verne, and Alexander Sergeievich Pushkin to name a few. Marie Antoinette, Napoleon, Popes, and Sir Winston Churchill, as well as Kings Queens, and other noted Historical Figures have worn them. If I found the story lacking at all it was the Author's choice of what is arguably the finest watchmaker in history, and the too little attention he paid to the man and his creations. This is a novel and the writer seems too meticulous to make such a large historical error as appeared in this book. My guess is that it would make sense taken together with the first novel, but at present I can only guess. Read alone this is a well-crafted and enjoyable tale. I would hazard that read in sequence it would be even more of a pleasure.
|
