Case of Curiosities

In France on the eve of the Revolution a young man named Claude Page sets out to become the most ingenious and daring inventor of his time. In the course of a career filled with violence and passion Claude learns the arts of enameling and watchmaking from an irascible defrocked abbé apprentices himself to a pornographic bookseller and applies his erotic erudition to the seduction of the wife of an impotent wigmaker. But it is Claude's greatest device-a talking mechanical head-that both crowns his career and leads to an execution as tragic as that of Marie Antoinette and far more bizarre. <p/>Hailed by critics for the shimmering brilliance of its inventions and its uncanny fidelity to the textures of the past <em>A Case of Curiosities</em> places <p/>Allen Kurzweil securely in the ranks of the finest literary artists of our time. <p/> <br>