Salamander

Description

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.

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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.

2005-12-07 (San Diego, CA) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 5

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Not satisfying
The first chapters of the book are very promising and involving because they don't reveal too much. That's good to begin with but once you keep on reading and realize that THIS is the style of the entire book, you're gonna wish you would have spent your reading time with a better book.
I finished reading because I am a completist. Otherwise I would have stopped half way, where I started to lose interest.
There are too many stories and too many complex characters that don't get the time they should have to make the story whole. Interesting premise but not satisfying at all.

2004-12-17 (Miami, FL) | Helpful Votes: 4 | Rating: 1

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

2004-11-27 | RAR! (Cali) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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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.

2003-09-29 (Boston, MA) | Helpful Votes: 3 | Rating: 4

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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.

2003-07-02 | Helpful Votes: 7 | Rating: 4

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The Church of Christ

Description

This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.

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Icefields

Description

Winner of:

The Banff Grand National Prize for Literature

The Writers Guild of Alberta Best First Book Award

The Commonwealth Best First Novel Prize (Caribbean and Canada Region)

At a quarter past three in the afternoon, on August 17, 1898, Doctor Edward Byrne slipped on the ice of Acturus glacier in the Canadian Rockies and slid into a crevasse . . .

Nearly sixty feet below the surface, Byrne is wedged upside down between the narrowing walls of a chasm, fighting his desire to sleep. The ice in front of him is lit with a pale blue-green radiance. There, embedded in he pure, antediluvian glacier, Byrne sees something that will inextricably link him to the vast bed of ice, and the people who inhabit this strange corner of the world. In this moment, his life becomes a quest to uncover the mystery of the icefield that almost became his tomb.

Within the deceptively simple framework of a tourist guidebook, Icefields takes a breathtaking, imaginative look at the human spirit, loss, myth, and elusive truths. Here is an impressive literary landscape, and an expedition unlike any you have ever experienced.

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This first novel begins with an imaginative and ingenious premise: a physician trekking across the Arcturus Glacier in the Canadian Rockies in 1898 slips and tumbles into a crevasse, where he beholds a winged human figure. The rest of the book tells of Dr. Edward Byrne's efforts to get to the bottom of the mystery in the ice. Along the way, he encounters a series of eccentrics, each involved in their own quest: the explorer Freya; the industrialist Trask; the poet Hal; and the slightly mad Elspeth, Byrne's lover. Told through scientific notes, journal entries, letters, and dialogue, this historical tale of the incalculable encountered in the mountains marks a promising debut.

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Customer Reviews

A Slippery Slope
Wharton has written a mythical story of the search for meaning; for what's passed by; for what's yet to come; for the love of one for another and the fear of it. This story has been written thousands of times by hundreds of authors - and will be - in the same numbers - probably for the rest of time.

This version, however, is short enough to not have the reader wallow in melancholy; while long enough to let you really sense the glacial landscape he chose for the setting.

I have no idea which of the characters I most identify with, but I would like to meet several of them - each for a different reason.

This isn't a difficult read, but it will cause considerable reflection about our obsessions and their impact on others as well as ourselves.

2008-03-22 (Oklahoma USA) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

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More than a poem, less than a book
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Fluff or not? Not really either
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On the day Bryne fell into a crevasse and nearly died his life changed forever. A man prone to obsession, Bryne's experience up-side-down and encased in ice would start him on a quest forever linked with the mountain and its ever-changing cloak of ice. His passion for things of the natural world only fed this new attraction and, over his lifetime, brought him back to the glacier over and over again - first to visit, then to study, and finally to live upon it. Times changed, people changed, the town changed, and Bryne changed, but his study taught him that the glacier's change was methodical and predictable. Bryne searched his whole life for the lesson he thought the glacier was trying to teach and for the precious thing it took from him that fateful first day without ever realizing that his obsession was robbing him every day of really living. The magic he was looking for was right in front of him the whole time.

Bryne's story is compelling, the characters eccentric, the scenery powerful, the time mysterious, and the ice . . . cold.

---- What I liked ----
There is magic in these pages - in the story, in the characters, and in the words. By choosing to approach this book as a poem, rather than a book, you will be more able to appreciate what this work has to offer.

---- What I didn't ----
This book needed a lot more editing before being sent to press. The writing, though beautiful at times, was generally sloppy, lacked cohesion, and did not deliver the story smoothly.

2008-01-05 (Bellevue, WA United States) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 2

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Sparse, quiet, pensive -- remarkable
Like another reviewer here, I came to Icefields after reading Wharton's second novel, Salamander. The two could NOT be more different! What they have in common is Wharton's astonishing gift for imagery, and for seeing (or hearing or touching or tasting ...) the mundane in completely new ways. I would agree with the reviewer who cautioned potential readers that the blurb is not quite accurate, but where that reviewer said that the novel failed to deliver, I would put it the other way around: the novel *does* deliver, but the blurb on the back cover doesn't accurately capture what that message is.

I found the novel to be a quiet, beautiful, and intensely inward-looking work. Almost minimalist. Again, different from Salamander. Remarkably thought-provoking (*like* Salamander). To me, it seems almost like a mirror image to Alan Garner's Strandloper -- though, since the settings are rather polar opposites (literally), perhaps a photographic negative is a better analogy.

2006-12-22 (Dallas, TX USA) | Helpful Votes: 2 | Rating: 5

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Passable
I bought this book on a whim, so I wasn't too disappointed upon finding it to be a fairly average and forgettable book. The prose is rather sparse, which Wharton may have done purposefully to match the setting of the novel. Some people might like it, but it was not to my taste.

2003-03-15 (Atlanta, GA USA) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 3

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Passable
I bought this book on a whim, so I wasn't too disappointed upon finding it to be a fairly average and forgettable book. The prose is rather sparse, which Wharton may have done purposefully to match the setting of the novel. Some people might like it, but it was not to my taste.

2003-03-15 (Atlanta, GA USA) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 3

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Queen of the South: New Orleans, 1853-1862

Description

"Queen of the South is a selected edition of the journal of Thomas Kelah Wharton, superintendent of construction for the New Orleans Custom House. His journal entries tell the story of daily life in antebellum New Orleans from 1853 to the outbreak of the Civil War.

For nine years, Wharton faithfully recorded and sketched in his journal contemporary reports on epidemics, luxurious Mississippi River steamboats, thundering sermons, society balls, moneymaking, architecture, and such technological breakthroughs as gaslights and piped river water.

He loved the city like a native even during the scorching heat of its six-month summers. Wharton wrote about an extraordinary time in the city's history, a time when fortunes were made and multiplied, the population doubled and redoubled, mansions and grand hotels were built, yellow fever raged, and armed men took to the streets during elections. It was a time of splendor and prosperity for New Orleans, a true golden age that ended abruptly with the outbreak of the Civil War and the capture of the city by the Union fleet. It was the end of an era. Queen of the South invites the reader to walk the unpaved streets of nineteenth-century New Orleans, to marvel at a white Lamarque rose blooming in winter, to pass doors adorned with crepe for yellow-fever victims, and to look downriver at Federal ships approaching to claim the city.

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Customer Reviews

Thomas Wharton's World
Journals are my favorite historical reading. I was amazed at TKW's World - and his view of the final antebellum years in New Orleans.

The read is interesting for what it includes and what it excludes. TKW knew and met every major citizen of the time; from Polk to Beauregard to Dr. Barton. You get a very detailed picture of what it was like for a man of the times; his everyday travels and travails. What it excludes is equally interesting - very little on the women he lived with, slavery, Mardi Gras and occupation.

The accent is definitely architecture and I found myself scanning - rather than reading - page after page of discussions on bricks and beams. Also, novice that I am, I found two errors (in the footnotes).

Still when I reached the end, it was a shock to the system. It felt as though TKW could not deal with occupation - of New Orleans and of his beloved Custom House - and just decided to die. It left me wanting more.

A very luxurious book, richly printed with tons of illustrations.

Favorite passage: "Some are Americans, but the French predominate, and the difference between them appears to be that the former have a little to say about everything, the latter a great deal to say about nothing at all."

2000-02-15 (New Orleans, LA) | Helpful Votes: 14 | Rating: 4

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JOSEPH & THOMAS WHARTON (Garland Reference Library of the Humanities)

Description

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Bobbo and Other Fancies, by Thomas Wharton; with an introduction by Owen Wister

Description

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