D'Alembert's Principle

by Andrew Crumey

Overview

"A wonderfully diverting and stimulating entertainment. Cunningly structured and as satisfying as an intricate piece of clockwork, it plays with narrative, revels in ideas and succeeds in being both fey and sharp, detached and compassionate. At a time when fiction gives all to the tired virtual realities of sex and violence, internets, Agas and middle-class Angst, it is a brilliant reminder of the power of the imagination to surprise, delight and open windows."
David Coward in The Times Literary Supplement

"Crumey does produce excellent post-modernist novels, each as concentric and cunning as the others. This is a triptych starting with D'Alembert penning his imagined memoirs. The literary equivalent of an Escher, the story has no identifiable end or beginning. Clever, entertaining, engaging"

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781873982327
Publisher:	Dedalus, Limited
Publication date:	06/30/2011
Pages:	204
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 7.75(h) x 0.67(d)

About the Author

Andrew Crumey was born in Glasgow in 1961. He read theoretical physics and mathematics at St Andrews University and Imperial College in London, before doing post-doctoral research.
His first novel Music, in a Foreign Language (1994) was awarded The Saltire Best First Book Prize. His second novel Pfitz (1995) was one of the books of the year for The Observer and The New York Times. He published D'Alembert's Principle to great acclaim in 1996.

Editorial Reviews

"Swift who relished every storyteller's ruse and mocked the pomp of scholarship would have enjoyed the Scottish writer Andrew Crumey."
Boyd Tonkin in The New Stateman

" D'Alembert's Principle is certainly another beautifully composed work which
lets you glide through the story but afterwards leaves you asking
questions,looking for connections and puzzling, quite happily, for hours."
Rosemary Goring in Scotland on Sunday

"Crumey is one of my three or four favourite modern writers - a wise, funny, alert and original novelist who has never disappointed."
Jonathan Coe

From the Publisher

Writing in the inventive, playful tradition of Calvino and Borges, Mr. Crumey blends history, fantasy, fable and metaphysical speculation in a confection that is at once elegant, provocative and thoroughly entertaining. -- Wall Street Journal

Merle Rubin

A master of the postmodern fable, Crumey follows his exceptional novel Pfitz (1997) with a related, albeit more obscure, trio of interlocking stories derived in part from the troubled life of mathematician and philosopher Jean D'Alembert. Organized around to the same three categoriesþMemory, Reason, and Imaginationþused by Diderot in his 18th-century encyclopedia, to which D`Alembert contributed extensively, this collection begins with the scientist reviewing his past on the day of his death, focusing particularly on the one nonscientific love of his life: Julie de L'Espinasse, about whom he believed no scandalous rumor (and was mistaken). His reflections alternate with observations of his maid, Justine, who is summoned from her reading of her master's papers by a madman at the door. Said madman leaves her with a manuscript supposedly refuting D'Alembert's lifework. This, "The Cosmography of Magnus Ferguson," forms the second story, in which one Magnus Ferguson struggles to understand how he came from a different dimension to Scotland, taking the place of his twin in this dimension. Finally, the character Pfitz, whose existence was denied in the novel named for him, appears as a beggar in the streets of Rreinnstadt to regale a passerby with tales, the first of which lands them in prison. His subsequent tales concern matters as diverse as a Dictionary of Identity, never completed, and a marvelous clock never fully understood. Once the reader's head stops spinning from trying to follow the intricate mechanics of the tale here, there is much to be enjoyed and admired. Still, Crumeyþs effort doesn't measure up to its less fragmentary predecessors. Somethingþsgone awry with the charm of his storytelling.

Kirkus Reviews