The Chemistry of Tears

[Bekah]

Well thank you Dave.  It's now on my wish list at Amazon -  I know I'll read it - it's  just a matter of time.   I'm not a big Carey fan but I follow his work which, imo, is very uneven in quality. 

Bekah

On Mar 31, 2012, at 8:44 AM, Dave Monroe wrote:

> 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