Allen Kurzweil

Mannerist and delicate… a debut work by an author who seems almost outrageously youthful… a brilliantly bookish book (with) a great deal of the friendly antiquarianism of a Washington Irving or Charles Dickens, mixed in with some very post-modern pleasures.

What John Fowles did for the 19th century with The French Lieutenant’s Woman and Umberto Eco did for the 14th with The Name of the Rose … Kurzweil now does for the late 18th century.

Brilliantly playful… More like a joint effort by Henry Fielding and John Barth, it is clever indeed but also riotous, melodramatic and erotic, full of lore and lewdness and crackling with ideas and exhilarated imagination.

Remarkable… extraordinarily vivid images, beautifully composed.

A Case of Curiosities, Allen Kurweil‘s first novel, really is brilliant. Also witty, learned, ingenious, sly, and bawdy… It reads as if it had been composed on Mount Parnassus by a committee that included Fielding, Thackeray, Voltaire, Nabokov, and Calvino.

Evoking this era with in dazzling literary and historical Technicolor, the witty, astute narrator reconstructs Claude’s life, whisking us effortlessly away to total immersion in the Age of Enlightenment.

What a wonderful leap of imagination A Case of Curiosities is. Allen Kurzweil has created big, colorful characters and placed them in an exciting time and place (Paris before the French Revolution).

At times robustly Rabelaisian, A Case of Curiosities is, above all, curiously Kurzweilian — a novel novel that‘s a ton of fun.