D'Alembert's Principle
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- ¥1,400
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- ¥1,400
Publisher Description
'A wonderfully diverting and stimulating entertainment. Cunningly structured and as satisfying as an intricate piece of clockwork, it plays with narrative, revels in ideas and succeeds in being both fey and sharp, detached and compassionate. At a time when fiction gives all to the tired virtual realities of sex and violence, internets, Agas and middle-class Angst, it is a brilliant reminder of the power of the imagination to surprise, delight and open windows.' David Coward in The Times Literary Supplement 'Crumey does produce excellent post-modernist novels, each as concentric and cunning as the others. This is a triptych starting with D'Alembert penning his imagined memoirs. The literary equivalent of an Escher, the story has no identifiable end or beginning. Clever, entertaining, engaging.' Lucy Atkins in The Guardian 'Swift who relished every storyteller's ruse and mocked the pomp of scholarship would have enjoyed the Scottish writer Andrew Crumey.' Boyd Tonkin in The New Stateman 'D'Alembert's Principle is certainly another beautifully composed work which?lets you glide through the story but afterwards leaves you asking?questions,looking for connections and puzzling, quite happily, for hours. Rosemary Goring in Scotland on Sunday This is a highly polished fable, which sustains its learning with wit and?zestful confidence.' Tom Deveson in The Sunday Times 'It is a prolonged attack on reductive thought, on any one way of seeing the world. Like quantum physics, the novel wants to offer the reader possibilities. It is very post-modern. The book also sets the the taste by which it should be judged. Like Crumey's giant astronomical clock, marking time of the universe, his ambitious novel works. It doesn't stop ticking. Alice Thompson in The Scotsman Crumey is one of my three or four favourite modern writers - a wise, funny, alert and original novelist who has never disappointed.' Jonathan Coe
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The senseless passion of 18th-century French mathematician Jean le Rond D'Alembert for his friend Julie de L'Espinasse (hinted at in Diderot's satire D'Alembert's Dream) is the subject of the strongest of the three interrelated novellas that make up this volume from Scottish author Crumey. Diderot implied that they were lovers; tragically, for D'Alembert, L'Espinasse never returned his passion. Instead, she fell for a number of other, physically imposing men. D'Alembert learns this from her letters after her death, and the claims of reason come tumbling down as he probes the logic of his passions. Crumey deftly outlines D'Alembert's life and times, albeit in broad, rather prim strokes. In his less compelling, oddly humorless second novella, a series of variations on the paradoxes of solipsism, Crumey follows the windings of an 18th-century author who appears and disappears in the text of his semifabulous book. The third, fortunately, goes for less heavily theoretical territory, returning to the characters of his acclaimed previous novel, Pfitz. A jeweler named Goldman in the city of Rrheinstadt gets thrown into prison with a beggar named Pfitz, and the beggar tells him a series of improbably scabrous tales. The loopy dialogue between Pfitz and Goldman is reminiscent of the Tortoise and Achilles sections in Douglas Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach. Crumey is described as a postmodernist, but he isn't anything so terrifying: he's simply reviving that old Enlightenment pastime, the philosophical jeu d'esprit. FYI: Crumey's first work, Music, in a Foreign Language, won England's Saltire Prize for Best First Novel.
