Stephenson, Neal. Quicksilver. Perennial, 2003.
Reason read: Neal Stephenson celebrates a birthday in October. Read in his honor.
The timeframe is 1660 – 1688 and Europe is transforming itself into a culture of scientific thinkers. Alchemy and imagination. Burgeoning financial complexities and modernized social developments abound. [Side note: the experiments on dogs was really hard to read. And I’m not a dog person.] Quicksilver follows real-life historical figures in real-life events. The glint in a crow’s eye. The cough of a cholera-infected child. Fine grains of dirt that cling to a man’s boots as he strides across a courtyard. The tremble of a drop of water as it rolls down a soot-covered windowpane. The hair of a rat as it scurries under a table. The details of Quicksilver are even finer than this; an overabundance of details. I hope you stub your toes on the sly humor that pops up in between the verbose narrative.
Additional facts about Quicksilver: it is exactly one third of the Baroque Cycle, Stephenson’s trilogy. Quicksilver in and of itself is in three separate parts. The second section follows the adventures of Jack Shaftoe. The third involves a slave who ties the characters of the first two sections together. As an aside, Eliza’s story had me scratching my head. I felt that Stephenson had more to say about her than he was letting on. The writing of Cryptonomicon and the reading about Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz inspired Stephenson to write Quicksilver.
Author fact: Stephenson wrote Quicksilver, all 930 plus pages of it, by longhand.
Book trivia: This might be a no-brainer for some, but read Peter Ackroyd’s London: the Biography before Quicksilver. Certain historical events and characters will come into sharper focus when you meet up with them in Quicksilver. For example, I enjoyed reading about the fictional account of the Great Fire of 1666 from Ackroyd’s storytelling perspective.
BookLust Twist: from More Book Lust in the obvious chapter called “Neal Stephenson: Too Good To Miss” (p 214).
~*LunaSea*~ 