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Adult Books - Fiction - General Fiction
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D’Alembert’s Principle: Memory, Reason and Imagination.
Crumey, Andrew (author).
Nov. 1998. 208p. Picador, hardcover, $21 (0-312-19568-0).
REVIEW.
First published October 15, 1998 (Booklist).
Crumey is reviving the eighteenth-century philosophical romance, the genre of Voltaire’s Candide and Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas Here he plunges into the form’s original milieu, placing Jean d’Alembert (1717–83), the mathematician coauthor, with Diderot, of the influential Encyclopedie at the center of a jeu d’esprit contesting the Enlightenment belief that there is but one reality. The book is in three slightly connected parts, corresponding to the encylopedists’ division of knowledge into memory, reason, and imagination. The first is d’Alembert’s memoirs, primarily concerned with his unrequited love for the salon hostess Julie de L’Espinasse. The second is “The Cosmography of Magnus Ferguson,” which illustrates Ferguson’s theory of multiple realities in a series of voyages to other planets by a different incarnation of Ferguson. The third is more of the “Tales from Rreinnstadt,” from which Crumey’s Pfitz was drawn; storytelling Pfitz is a protagonist in it. Proceeding from poignancy to awe to hilarity, the three parts constitute an intellectual treat that admirers of Borges and philosophical sf master Stanislaw Lem, in particular, should appreciate.— Ray Olson
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