Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
The first Dalkey edition of Eric Darton's novel Free City.
Synopsis
The first Dalkey edition of Eric Darton's novel Free City. An inventor living at the beginning of the Enlightenment keeps journals reflecting on everything from his inventive lovemaking to his discovery of the first binary code, plus caffeine stimulation, the insanity defense, and the memory of birds. Set in the mid-1600s in an unnamed northern European port much like Antwerp, Darton's seductive fable is a stylistic tour de force, a dazzling parable about the birth of the modern age with its terrors and promise. It unfolds as the diary of a Leonardo-like inventor, scientist, surgeon, memory expert and sexual acrobat whose inventions include explosives, anesthetics, a military airship and humanlike automata. This unnamed polymath, scornful of the city's privileged burghers and full of withering irony as a keen observer of human failings, has made a Faustian pact with his patron, Roberto, a ruthless, grandiloquent merchant and slave trader whose traffic in human cargo morally repulses the narrator. Adela, the inventor's mistress, is a healer and herbalist who lapses into delirium and communes with an entity she calls Master. The plot centers on Roberto's attempt to seize absolute political power and the inventor's devious schemes to foil his patron's tyrannical ambitions. Darton, who teaches media, technology and cultural studies at Hunter College in New York, creates weird symbols of technology run amok, such as Friedrich, Roberto's garrulous talking duck--no mere clockwork mechanism but a multilingual bird that resents its manipulative master. Published in a compact 41/2""x 63/4"" format, this short debut novel is reminiscent of Italo Calvino's work in its dashing mingling of history and fantasy. Author tour. (Sept.)
Synopsis
First published in 1996 to international acclaim, Eric Darton's Free City is the fictional journal of L., a seventeenth-century inventor caught in a precarious love triangle, even as his beloved northern European port town teeters on the brink of catastrophe.
In a tale laced with bawdy humor and elements of the fantastical, L. must balance the demands of his patron--a rapacious entrepreneur--against those of his sorceress lover. As L. attempts to avert calamity, he finds himself joined by the most unlikely of allies.
Weaving together historical, political and absurdist elements, Free City resonates more profoundly today than ever.
Synopsis
An inventor living at the beginning of the Enlightenment keeps journals reflecting on everything from his inventive lovemaking to his discovery of the first binary code, caffeine stimulation, the insanity defense, and the memory of birds.
First published in 1996 to international acclaim, Eric Darton's Free City is the fictional journal of L., a seventeenth-century inventor caught in a precarious love triangle, even as his beloved northern European port town teeters on the brink of catastrophe.
In a tale laced with bawdy humor and elements of the fantastical, L. must balance the demands of his patron--a rapacious entrepreneur--against those of his sorceress lover. As L. attempts to avert calamity, he finds himself joined by the most unlikely of allies.
Weaving together historical, political and absurdist elements, Free City resonates more profoundly today than ever.