'The Grand Complication'

The corner behind the Circulation section of the HCDC-H.S. Library is one place that's frequented by students. Their reason, I guess, is not so much to look for some good reads as it is to hide from the watchful eyes of the librarian and the student assistants.

One dull afternoon, I went there not to scold some noisy students, but to look for a book that could while my time away.

Tom Wolfe's "Bonfire of the Vanities" is there as well as such literary gems as Gertrude Stein's "Lucy Church Amiably," Albert Camus' "La Peste" (The Plague), and Graham Greene's "The Captain and the Enemy."

After going over one book after another, I settled for "The Grand Complication" by Allen Kurzweil.

Is my taste so bad that I bypassed Camus or Greene or Stein for Kurzweil?

Call me anything you want, but remember: I only need a book that could while my time away. And yet, as I read "The Grand Complication"----it isn't complicated at all; it's an easy read, mind you----I found the book unputdownable.

"The Grand Complication":

a stunning and suspenseful novel by the author of the critically acclaimed international bestseller A Case of Curiosities, is narrated by Alexander Short, a stylish young reference librarian of arcane interests. With his job in jeopardy and his marriage coming unhinged, Alexander finds odd solace in the notebook he keeps tethered to his jacket.

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. 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.

I liked it because most of the scenes happened in the library, and I work in the library. The card catalog. The Dewey Decimal System. The call slip. The bookshelves. Oh, I never thought that a place so seemingly boring as the library can be a setting for so brilliant a novel.