Mr Mee
-
- $15.99
-
- $15.99
Publisher Description
Enriching, enlightening, and highly entertaining. 'The Boston Globe' An intellectual romp . . . Crumey has spun a delightful brain-tickler of a novel that undermines its own pretensions, a subversion that is in fact at the heart of the book's very real debate over the power of literature to redeem or corrupt or do anything at all'. Maureen Shelly in Time Out 'Crumey tells [his] tale with elegance and humor, and in rich detail. His immense talent reveals itself most potently in his ability to find remarkable connections in otherwise disparate intellectual concepts conceived over the course of several centuries, and then to turn those connections into a coherent and lively story . . . The many surprises and twists [in this book] provide a rare and spectacular reading experience . . . Mr. Mee is a challenging book, but it's one to savour'. Andrew C. Ervin in The Washington Post Book World 'Like a trompe l'oeil painting, or a puzzle that invites us to draw at least two contradictory, yet equally plausible conclusions, Mr. Mee disturbs as it diverts, charms as it challenges'. The Washington Times 'In short-it's fabulous. This is a novel which deserves to break its author through, if ever I read one. . . Mr Mee had me helpless with laughter'. Jonathan Coe 'Mr Mee is not only an intellectual treat but a moving meditation on aspiration and desire'.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Musing on Rousseau, the French encyclopedists and the vagaries of chance and identity, Crumey (Pfitz; D'Alembert's Principle) has written another novel of ideas in the grand tradition of Calvino, Borges and Kundera. This delightful romp around the knottiest concerns raised by Enlightenment philosophers and postmodernists alike centers on the long-vanished Rosier's Encyclopaedia, a 200-year-old French text that may challenge the existence of the universe. Setting out to track down Rosier's work, dotty old Mr. Mee, a reclusive British book collector, embarks on a quest that introduces him to the Internet in all its seamy variety (he finds an unclad woman reading a Rosier-related text on one site) and brings on the attentions of a "life scientist" named Catriona, who introduces him to the pleasures of the flesh. Mee's narrative alternates with that of a Dr. Petrie, a professor of French literature desperately in love with one of his students, and Ferrand and Minard, the bumbling 18th-century French copyists charged with reproducing Rosier's original manuscript. Mee may be the most endearing narrator, and Ferrand and Minard the most haplessly slapstick, but Petrie proves the most perceptive, lacing his lovelorn lamentations with reflections on Proust and Flaubert. Crumey also provides tantalizing glimpses of the Encyclopaedia itself, its treatises all absurdly outdated and yet provocatively applicable to modern-day computer science and physics. The novel isn't perfectDits philosophical asides can be hard going, and it's easy to lose patience with the exaggerated ineptitude of all its narratorsDbut Crumey's light treatment of hefty material should win the minds, if not the hearts, of his readers.
