Pablo De Santis

I'll begin by saying that this book was beautifully and imaginatively written---the language is just lovely and so creative. For example:

pg. 134: "Although there were no books in Grialet's house, the house itself was a book. The building, I found out later, had belonged to an editor named Fussel, who had the door and windows built to look like book covers. The spiral staircases crossed through the building like arabesques, unexpected rooms appeared here and there like footnotes, the hallways extended like careless margin notes."

The imagery alone is a good enough reason to read this book.

As for the story, it was predictable---but good. The back cover sensationalizes to make it sound like a riveting, fast-paced thriller when it is, instead, a meandering stream of a "mystery". It's really a combination of lots of little stories that come together in the end for a gentle but satisfying conclusion.

Don't be led on by the marketing attempts at making this out to be all about the World's Fair or the building of the Eiffel Tower. These events are mentioned as the backdrop of the story...but that's about it. There is VERY little history of either event and any time they come up it's mainly in relation to how many days until the Fair, etc.

I don't regret reading this, but it definitely took longer than I expected to finish it as I wasn't really engaged in the story line. It didn't really get super interesting or "mysterious" until the last 40 pages or so.… (more)

A postmodern historical novel, set in Enlightenment France and full of playful reflections on philosophy, history, and aesthetics, this is the sort of thing I normally really enjoy, but somehow it never really clicked for me. Maybe it was the translation, which felt a little bit flat and lacking in linguistic bounce, maybe it was the rather over-busy plot, which seemed to be bursting out of the slim, novella-length package in all directions, not giving the characters any real chance to develop and solidify. I believe De Santis is a major figure in graphic-novel circles, and perhaps that has something do with it: the story often felt as though it would have benefited from pictures. A graphic novel format might also have fitted in better with the way the border between history and fantasy is about 90% of the way over to the fantasy side.

The general idea is that the narrator, Dalessius, trained in calligraphy and employed as a copyist by the Sage of Ferney, finds himself acting as a kind of secret agent in a power-struggle between his boss and the Dominicans, who are (of course) plotting world-domination. There are also exploding sexbots, poison-pens, time-delay inks, a program-controlled bishop, and an overnight corpse delivery service involved in the story, inter alia.

A silly quibble that disturbed me throughout was the use of the word "calligrapher" as job-description for Dalessius. This word first appeared in English in the mid-18th century in line with the rise of interest in orientalism, and it was initially only used to describe artists producing decorative versions of handwritten texts for religious or display purposes in Islamic and Far Eastern cultures. The same applies to French calligraphe — unfortunately I haven't got a historical dictionary of Spanish to hand to check the history of calígrafo, but I assume it will be similar to French. The term calligraphy goes back about a century earlier.

The main action of the book is set between the Jean Calas case in 1762 and Voltaire's death in 1778. At that time, someone like Dalessius, whose job was the old-established one of making accurate, high-quality copies of legal and business manuscripts, would have used a term like clerk, copyist (both early-renaissance), scribe or scrivener (medieval). Obviously, there's no law against using an anachronistic word in a historical novel, particularly a non-realist one, but I find it odd when a writer — who presumably knows what he's doing — puts a word like that in the centre of the foreground and doesn't trouble to tell us why he is doing so.… (more)

I wouldn't recommend it as the most fetching book of its kind, but you can find some interesting stuff here and there, if you look hard enough.
For example I enjoyed the references to the antinomy between the old and the new, the caligraphy becoming obsolete and the modern, practical printed word.
All in all I did not enjoy the tone and atmosphere of the book - where it should have been mysterious, it seemed to me just weird.
I realized Voltaire was totally disposable for me in the book. I'm sure there were some cultural references somewhere but I missed them completely.… (more)