Allen Kurzweil Ordine dei libri

Narrated by Alexander Short, a stylish young reference librarian of arcane interests, The Grand Complication propels the reader through a card catalog of desperation and delight, of intrigue and theft. It’s a novel of suspense that comes full circle, with a clock-maker’s precision and a storyteller’s surprise, on page 360. The account begins with Alexander’s job in jeopardy and his marriage destined for the Discard shelf. Enter the improbably named Henry James Jesson III, a bibliophile who hires the librarian for some after-hours research. The task: to render whole an incomplete cabinet of wonders chronicling the life of a mysterious eighteenth-century inventor. As the investigation heats up, Alexander realizes there are many more secrets lurking in Jesson’s cloistered world than those found inside his elegant Manhattan town house. With a notebook tethered to his jacket, Alexander plunges headlong into the search, only to discover that the void in the cabinet is rivaled by an emptiness in his heart. A delicious compendium of quirky colleagues, erotic pop-ups, deviant passions, and miraculous examples of theft, the book is a grand and complicated “timepiece,” told with a devilish sense of fun. (From the colophon: The tiny gear used as a space break is a freehand rendering of an escapement wheel contained inside the Marie Antoinette, Abraham-Louis Breguet’s pocket watch masterpiece. The whereabouts of of the watch, stolen from a Jerusalem museum in 1983, is unknown.)