The Chemistry of Tears

[Dave Monroe]

The Chemistry of Tears
Peter Carey

When her lover dies suddenly, all Catherine has left is her work.

The long affair had been kept secret from their colleagues at London's
Swinburne Museum and now she must grieve in private.  Or almost.  In
an act of compassion, the head of her department gives Catherine a
very particular project, something to cling onto: a box of intricate
clockwork parts that appear to be the remains of a nineteenth-century
automaton, a beautiful mechanical bird.

http://www.penguin.com.au/products/9781926428154/chemistry-tears

http://www.randomhouse.com/book/200304/the-chemistry-of-tears-by-peter-carey

To distract Catherine Gehrig from her frantic grief, her boss at a
fictional London museum assigns her to the complicated work of
restoring a bizarre and enormously intricate work of clockwork
automaton, the mechanical bird commissioned in 1854 by Henry Brandling
in the hope of rousing his boy back to healthy spirits. Gehrig hides
herself away in the bowels of the museum annex, in her basement flat,
and in the yellowed pages of Brandling’s many scribbled notebooks;
Brandling loses himself in a mysterious part of Germany, seeking to
have his vision – or, rather, the vision of the 18th-century French
inventor Jacques de Vaucanson – turned into an apparently living,
breathing duck by the magician-like clockmakers of the Black Forest.

[...]

... for a long time, Carey has wanted to write a novel that somehow
explored the wonder of engines and of the internal combustion engine
in particular. He thought, for a time, of setting the book in
Australia, close to that garage of his childhood; later, he thought of
setting it in Detroit, where Henry Ford founded his company.

While he was mulling over all this, he was also fuming about the
realities of our overheating, self-destructing planet, which were
becoming ever more impossible to ignore. And then he found the duck.
The duck that was actually invented in the 18th century by de
Vaucanson, and that Carey took – as in their own ways both Hawthorne
and Pynchon had done before him – and reimagined in fictional terms.

[...]

Industry begets technology; engines beget networks; automatons beget
the internet, which is doing who knows what to us all....

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/weekend/2012/0331/1224314135848.html

Nathaniel Hawthorne, "The Artist of the Beautiful," Twice Told Tales (1844)

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Artist_of_the_Beautiful

http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/HawArti.html

Victor Frankenstein and Owen Warland: The Artist as Satan and as God

http://knarf.english.upenn.edu/Articles/lewis.html

The Transcendentalist Experience of Beauty in "The Artist of the Beautiful"

http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/transcendentalism/criticism/artist.html