Salamander

By Thomas Wharton

Book Overview

Nicholas Flood, an unassuming eighteenth-century London printer, specializes in novelty books -- books that nestle into one another, books comprised of one spare sentence, books that emit the sounds of crashing waves. When his work captures the attention of an eccentric Slovakian count, Flood is summoned to a faraway castle -- a moving labyrinth that embodies the count's obsession with puzzles -- where he is commissioned to create the infinite book, the ultimate never-ending story. Probing the nature of books, the human thirst for knowledge, and the pursuit of immortality, Salamander careens through myth and metaphor as Flood travels the globe in search of materials for the elusive book without end.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0743444159
• ISBN13: 9780743444156
• Release Date: August 2002
• Publisher: Atria Books
• Length: 400 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.6" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Beautiful

This is one of the best books I've read in a long time. Wharton takes elements from Borges and Calvino and blends it with some well researched and fascinating history. Like a previous reviewer wrote, it's such a compelling universe with such well developed characters that I didn't want it to end. But Wharton knows how to tell a story and he does it very well. It reminded me in many ways of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, minus several thousand pages and several dollars. It's selling for pennis here, so there's no reason at all not to buy it.

An amazing read!

Salamander is an amazing book, telling the story of Nicholas Flood, a printer and his many adventures

Suspend your belief for a moment

Oh how I would love to enter the castle in Salamander! What a strange place, you wake up in a different room than you went to sleep in, walls move and change.A book creater is hired to create a book like no other for a count during the 1700's. The problem begins when Flood, the book creator falls in love with the counts daughter.A engaging mystery with love and a bit of the fantastic sprinkled in. A dalightful read.

Enough imagination for a much bigger book

The book opens during the siege of Quebec in 1759, just before the town is about to be taken by the British. A French count meets a beautiful girl in a bombed out bookshop, and she tells him the story of one of the books in the shop...The rest of the book is the story of Nicholas Flood, who is brought from London to the Balkans by an eccentric Count, who wants him to create books that will fit in with his castle. The castle is designed so that all of the rooms are in perpetual motion, moving like a giant clockwork toy. Flood's first commission is to make a book without end. However, he falls in love with the Count's daughter, and when they are discovered, Flood is imprisoned, and the daughter is banished.Giving away more would spoil the surprises in the plot, which not surprisingly, is driven by Flood's desire to find the Count's daughter once more, despite the obstacles that are put in his way. In the process of doing this, he creates another magical book. This is a historical novel that will appeal to you if you liked "Perfume", "The Name of the Rose" "An Instance of the Fingerpost" or the Thomas Pargeter novels, or "A Case of Curiosities". The only thing that stops it getting five stars is that I felt it pulled its punches a bit - there are enough materials in here for a much bigger novel, and once you are immersed in the world that Wharton creates, you don't want to leave. If every character's backstory was described as lovingly as the French aristocrat in the first chapter, there would have been a lot more to the book, and I would have enjoyed it even more. I felt that once Wharton had created so many interesting characters and situations, he would do a lot more with them, especially as he sends them all over the world (Venice, London, China). Having said that, other readers may prefer the fact that the novel is not that long, and the story is certainly satisfying. No loose ends or anything like that.

Second Effort

This novel, the author's second effort, is a complex, romantic and fascinating fable. While focused on the manufactured puzzles of printers, automata-makers and the like, the book's early eighteenth century characters manuever through the puzzles of their lives. From Hungary to Venice, Alexandria and farther afield, Salamander is a puzzle unto itself, that rewards the reader with good writing, big ideas and strong narrative.