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The Invention of Everything Else
From the moment she first catches sight of Nikola Tesla on New Year's Day, 1943, Louisa, obsessed with radio dramas and the secret lives of the hotel guests, is determined to befriend this strange man. Winning his attention through their shared love of pigeons, Louisa eventually uncovers the extraordinary story of Tesla's life as a Serbian immigrant and a visionary genius. Meanwhile, Louisa finds herself facing her father's imminent departure in a time machine.
272 pages, Hardcover
First published February 7, 2008
181 people are currently reading
4377 people want to read
About the author
Samantha Hunt
21 books819 followersSamantha Hunt was born in 1971 in Pound Ridge, New York, the youngest of six siblings. She was raised in a house built in 1765 which wasn't haunted in the traditional sense but was so overstuffed with books— good and bad ones— that it had the effect of haunting Hunt all the same. Her mother is a painter and her father was an editor. In 1989 Hunt moved to Vermont where she studied literature, printmaking, and geology. She got her MFA from Warren Wilson College and then, in 1999, moved to New York City. While working on her writing, she held a number of odd jobs including a stint in an envelope factory.
Samantha Hunt received a National Book Foundation award for authors under 35, for her novel, The Seas. The Invention of Everything Else was shortlisted for the Orange Prize. She won the Bard Fiction Prize for 2010.
Samantha Hunt received a National Book Foundation award for authors under 35, for her novel, The Seas. The Invention of Everything Else was shortlisted for the Orange Prize. She won the Bard Fiction Prize for 2010.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 443 reviews
February 2, 2013
When I worked at Barnes & Noble, I would occasionally glance at the learning packets sent to all employees company-wide. In a particularly annoying campaign aimed at bringing us wee booksellers into an assumed corporate culture of Book Lust, they introduced us to a term that I despised from the get-go.
Unputdownable.
Un-put-down-able. Adjective. The otherwise indescribable characteristic of a book that keeps its reader's face glued between its pages. Recommended for use: During sales when a personal recommendation would add to the buyer's incentive to purchase. Example: "OMG, you're looking at the Paris Hilton tell-all? That's hot! I loved it. It's unputdownable! I actually finished it!!1"
Doh. This stupid stupid made-up word is stupid for a couple of reasons:
1. It's stupid.
2. Did I mention it's made-up?
3. It presupposes that a fantastic book only has one effect on the reader. It's true that many great books will stay in my hands for hours on end because I just have to find out what's going to happen next. Recently, I found myself hooked on Alas, Babylon for exactly this reason. But it isn't the only response that means something.
The Invention of Everything Else has, so far, had the exact opposite effect on me. I read one page and I have to put it down. No, no, those five stars aren't a mistake. I don't hate this book. I love it. After half a page or so, this book has me so convinced of the magic in the world--that I have to go explore it for myself. Instead of wanting to stay in the pages with the characters, I want to go find a world like this one and exist in it myself, making wrong turns and bad choices and cursing my feet wet in the puddles.
I haven't finished yet, appropriately. It's a slim volume, so if I spent real time with it, I'd have flown through by now. Instead, though, I'm savoring the atmosphere of magic and living under its umbrella as long as I can.
Unputdownable.
Un-put-down-able. Adjective. The otherwise indescribable characteristic of a book that keeps its reader's face glued between its pages. Recommended for use: During sales when a personal recommendation would add to the buyer's incentive to purchase. Example: "OMG, you're looking at the Paris Hilton tell-all? That's hot! I loved it. It's unputdownable! I actually finished it!!1"
Doh. This stupid stupid made-up word is stupid for a couple of reasons:
1. It's stupid.
2. Did I mention it's made-up?
3. It presupposes that a fantastic book only has one effect on the reader. It's true that many great books will stay in my hands for hours on end because I just have to find out what's going to happen next. Recently, I found myself hooked on Alas, Babylon for exactly this reason. But it isn't the only response that means something.
The Invention of Everything Else has, so far, had the exact opposite effect on me. I read one page and I have to put it down. No, no, those five stars aren't a mistake. I don't hate this book. I love it. After half a page or so, this book has me so convinced of the magic in the world--that I have to go explore it for myself. Instead of wanting to stay in the pages with the characters, I want to go find a world like this one and exist in it myself, making wrong turns and bad choices and cursing my feet wet in the puddles.
I haven't finished yet, appropriately. It's a slim volume, so if I spent real time with it, I'd have flown through by now. Instead, though, I'm savoring the atmosphere of magic and living under its umbrella as long as I can.
Read
September 13, 2019I wanted to like this book more than I did. It was beautiful in concept, containing a genius (real-life) scientist, time-travel, romance, and espionage, but somehow I had trouble staying interested. The narrative jumped around a lot and was mostly written in present tense, which I found oddly off-putting. The writing was swirly and ambiguous, filled with ambitious metaphors. But still, I'm not sure why I wasn't captivated by this book and the beautiful writing. The author did an excellent job of bringing 1940's NYC to life, but somehow it was all still too dreamy and hard to pin down at times. I found myself skimming paragraphs just to finish the story and find out what happens at the end. Maybe I'm getting too used to reading children's novels?
May 21, 2020
Orange Prize shortlisted, a fictionalized, almost part sci-fi account of the last week of life of radio and alternating current inventor Nikola Tesla when discovered living permanently in his hotel room by a chambermaid. I found this really difficult to get into, and probably need to re-read it. 3 out of 12
August 5, 2017
Incredible writing, very interesting characters, fascinating interactions between them. But a clumsy story structure and ending, in my opinion.
If this was just a historical drama without the time travelling mess, this book is a 5 starer. I loved all the main characters, their quirks and all. I also loved how the narration switches back and forth between two time periods. That was enough to make the concept of 'time' a little confusing, but it was fine as long as I could understand the story. But that part went up in the air as the story came to a close as the author never properly makes it clear whether time travelling is actually happening in the story or if the characters are just too full of themselves and are fools in delusion. Either that, or I wasn't an intelligent enough reader. :/
If this was just a historical drama without the time travelling mess, this book is a 5 starer. I loved all the main characters, their quirks and all. I also loved how the narration switches back and forth between two time periods. That was enough to make the concept of 'time' a little confusing, but it was fine as long as I could understand the story. But that part went up in the air as the story came to a close as the author never properly makes it clear whether time travelling is actually happening in the story or if the characters are just too full of themselves and are fools in delusion. Either that, or I wasn't an intelligent enough reader. :/
November 28, 2013
Samantha Hunt's magical new novel is a love letter to one of the world's most remarkable inventors. You may never have heard of Nikola Tesla, but he briefly outshone Edison and Westinghouse, and from the moment you wake up in the morning, you depend on devices made possible by his revolutionary work with electricity. Tesla was born in Serbia in 1856, and his life followed a rags-to-riches-to-rags trajectory that would sound melodramatic if it weren't so tragic and true -- or told with such surprising charm in The Invention of Everything Else.
This melancholy romance begins on the first day of 1943, in the New Yorker hotel, once the tallest building in the city. It rises up in these pages in all its mysterious grandeur, a lighter version of the surreal hotel in Steven Millhauser's Martin Dressler (1996). Impoverished by a series of disastrous financial dealings, Tesla has been holed up here with his notes and unpaid bills for 10 years. He's talking to himself or to his beloved pigeon. His reputation has been eclipsed by other inventors (some of them thieves) and derided by the popular press. (Superman battles a mad scientist named Tesla.) There are rumors that he believes he's receiving messages from Mars, that he's building a death ray, that he's working on a time machine.
Indeed, the novel is something of a time machine itself, and not just because of its lyrical recreation of New York in the first half of the 20th century. The story is a Rube Goldberg contraption of history, slapstick, biography and science fiction: a narrative bricolage that looks too precarious to work but is too alluring to resist.
Holding it all together is a young woman named Louisa who works as a maid at the New Yorker. She "imagines herself a small but necessary part of the glimmering hotel," which employs 2,000 people. She's "a sharp city girl, frank, skeptical, and wise, with a desperate weakness for corny radio tales." She lives with her widowed father, a night watchman at the public library, and those lurid radio stories provide the only drama in her life. But they also fire her imagination about "her alter ego, part chambermaid, part detective."
During a blackout on New Year's Day, she notices a brilliant light coming from under the door of a double suite on the 33rd floor. "Someone in that room," she realizes, "has stolen all the electricity." And so begins a touching friendship between an 87-year-old inventor in the final weeks of his life and a 24-year-old woman whose life is about to begin.
A few subplots veer off like sparks -- more eye-catching than illuminating. There are ominous hints of a secret government investigation of Tesla. Other chapters describe his remarkable childhood, his early breakthroughs with alternating current, his bitter rivalry with Edison, his descent into a figure of public ridicule. Hunt throws in stranger-than-fiction anecdotes about the opening of the New York Public Library, the development of the electric chair, and Tesla's efforts to harness lightning and project it around the world. In the novel's present tense, Louisa meets a handsome stranger who seems to have come from the future. And her father becomes convinced that a friend's machine can take him back to see his dead wife.
I realize all this sounds hopelessly scrambled and silly, but Hunt moves through these engaging episodes with a voice that's at once smart and whimsical. And we can't help sharing Louisa's tender regard for Tesla. There's something incongruously vulnerable about this genius who hoped to harness the invisible fluid of the universe. Hunt peers into his childhood for the roots of his loneliness. He's certain that "love is impossible," yet spends his life trying to bring about a "future where human beings have wings and electricity is miraculous and free."
Hunt has so gracefully mingled outlandish fact with outlandish fiction that it's difficult to know where one begins and the other ends, but it's a delightful homage to the scientist who tells Louisa, "I want to be believed." For a moment, in these pages, everything seems possible.
http://articles.washingtonpost.com/20...
This melancholy romance begins on the first day of 1943, in the New Yorker hotel, once the tallest building in the city. It rises up in these pages in all its mysterious grandeur, a lighter version of the surreal hotel in Steven Millhauser's Martin Dressler (1996). Impoverished by a series of disastrous financial dealings, Tesla has been holed up here with his notes and unpaid bills for 10 years. He's talking to himself or to his beloved pigeon. His reputation has been eclipsed by other inventors (some of them thieves) and derided by the popular press. (Superman battles a mad scientist named Tesla.) There are rumors that he believes he's receiving messages from Mars, that he's building a death ray, that he's working on a time machine.
Indeed, the novel is something of a time machine itself, and not just because of its lyrical recreation of New York in the first half of the 20th century. The story is a Rube Goldberg contraption of history, slapstick, biography and science fiction: a narrative bricolage that looks too precarious to work but is too alluring to resist.
Holding it all together is a young woman named Louisa who works as a maid at the New Yorker. She "imagines herself a small but necessary part of the glimmering hotel," which employs 2,000 people. She's "a sharp city girl, frank, skeptical, and wise, with a desperate weakness for corny radio tales." She lives with her widowed father, a night watchman at the public library, and those lurid radio stories provide the only drama in her life. But they also fire her imagination about "her alter ego, part chambermaid, part detective."
During a blackout on New Year's Day, she notices a brilliant light coming from under the door of a double suite on the 33rd floor. "Someone in that room," she realizes, "has stolen all the electricity." And so begins a touching friendship between an 87-year-old inventor in the final weeks of his life and a 24-year-old woman whose life is about to begin.
A few subplots veer off like sparks -- more eye-catching than illuminating. There are ominous hints of a secret government investigation of Tesla. Other chapters describe his remarkable childhood, his early breakthroughs with alternating current, his bitter rivalry with Edison, his descent into a figure of public ridicule. Hunt throws in stranger-than-fiction anecdotes about the opening of the New York Public Library, the development of the electric chair, and Tesla's efforts to harness lightning and project it around the world. In the novel's present tense, Louisa meets a handsome stranger who seems to have come from the future. And her father becomes convinced that a friend's machine can take him back to see his dead wife.
I realize all this sounds hopelessly scrambled and silly, but Hunt moves through these engaging episodes with a voice that's at once smart and whimsical. And we can't help sharing Louisa's tender regard for Tesla. There's something incongruously vulnerable about this genius who hoped to harness the invisible fluid of the universe. Hunt peers into his childhood for the roots of his loneliness. He's certain that "love is impossible," yet spends his life trying to bring about a "future where human beings have wings and electricity is miraculous and free."
Hunt has so gracefully mingled outlandish fact with outlandish fiction that it's difficult to know where one begins and the other ends, but it's a delightful homage to the scientist who tells Louisa, "I want to be believed." For a moment, in these pages, everything seems possible.
http://articles.washingtonpost.com/20...
March 17, 2008
"God said, 'Let Tesla be,' and all was light."
- B. A. Behrend
Nikola Tesla is arguably one of the most important inventors to have ever lived, yet one of the most unsung. To him, we can credit the efficient alternating electrical current system, the remote control, and the radio (although Marconi stole the patent for that last one). He harnessed Niagara Falls' energy potential, is credited with giving birth to robotics, and his "Tesla Coil" gave us neon and fluorescent lighting and x-ray photography. Wildly imaginative, Tesla was also rumored to have experimented with wireless energy transmission, extraterrestrial communication, invisibility, antigravity, time travel, and a "Death Beam" which, as a life-long pacifist, he hoped would make war impossible due to its fearful capability of mass destruction. But thanks to a far better sense of imagination than a head for business, Tesla died penniless, living alone but for his pigeons in the Hotel New Yorker, his legacy largely obscured.
Needless to say, Samantha Hunt - who spent four years researching the life and work of Nikola Tesla, weaving this meticulous research into her sophomore novel - already had some fascinating source material at her disposal.
The Invention of Everything Else blends fact with fiction so well that it often becomes difficult to discern between the two. Taking a non-linear approach to storytelling, Hunt bounces around through Tesla's biography, revealing his life through stories of his childhood up to the story of his death; however, the bulk of the novel focuses on Tesla's final days in the Hotel New Yorker and his brief encounters with the fictional Louisa, a curious chambermaid who - fascinated by the myriad curiosities she uncovers in his hotel room and encouraged by a shared affinity for pigeons - is determined to befriend the reclusive scientist. Hunt's novel is a history lesson wrapped in a pretty story, and the extent to which you are interested in Tesla, science, and history is probably the extent to which you will enjoy The Invention of Everything Else. Seeing how I am fascinated with all of these things, I firmly loved it.
- B. A. Behrend
Nikola Tesla is arguably one of the most important inventors to have ever lived, yet one of the most unsung. To him, we can credit the efficient alternating electrical current system, the remote control, and the radio (although Marconi stole the patent for that last one). He harnessed Niagara Falls' energy potential, is credited with giving birth to robotics, and his "Tesla Coil" gave us neon and fluorescent lighting and x-ray photography. Wildly imaginative, Tesla was also rumored to have experimented with wireless energy transmission, extraterrestrial communication, invisibility, antigravity, time travel, and a "Death Beam" which, as a life-long pacifist, he hoped would make war impossible due to its fearful capability of mass destruction. But thanks to a far better sense of imagination than a head for business, Tesla died penniless, living alone but for his pigeons in the Hotel New Yorker, his legacy largely obscured.
Needless to say, Samantha Hunt - who spent four years researching the life and work of Nikola Tesla, weaving this meticulous research into her sophomore novel - already had some fascinating source material at her disposal.
The Invention of Everything Else blends fact with fiction so well that it often becomes difficult to discern between the two. Taking a non-linear approach to storytelling, Hunt bounces around through Tesla's biography, revealing his life through stories of his childhood up to the story of his death; however, the bulk of the novel focuses on Tesla's final days in the Hotel New Yorker and his brief encounters with the fictional Louisa, a curious chambermaid who - fascinated by the myriad curiosities she uncovers in his hotel room and encouraged by a shared affinity for pigeons - is determined to befriend the reclusive scientist. Hunt's novel is a history lesson wrapped in a pretty story, and the extent to which you are interested in Tesla, science, and history is probably the extent to which you will enjoy The Invention of Everything Else. Seeing how I am fascinated with all of these things, I firmly loved it.
February 27, 2011
Samantha Hunt's novel is an historical fiction surrounding the last months of the life of Nikola Tesla, the inventor of alternating current electricity. His life was much obscured by the better known Thomas Edison; however, as this book well illuminates, Edison was more rigid, conforming, capitalistic. It is a story about creativity, artistic inspiration, and imagining the unimaginable. What happens if the spirit can transcend into reality? What if a powerful intuition can link us to something infinite and previously unexplainable? This novel is a novel of ideas as much as it is a fictional biography on the life of a genius.
Magical realism blends with scientific query and knowledge. It is 1943 at the New Yorker hotel, where Tesla lives in isolation and penury with his pigeons and his journal and his thoughts. He is fascinated by the mystery of homing pigeons, the fact that they consistently find their way home. He meets Louisa, an educated young chambermaid there, who shares his fascination with pigeons and has a coop she keeps at her home. They develop a fragile, compassionate, and intellectual relationship.
As the story unfolds, mysteries open to even larger mysteries, and time as a theme seems to have a current as charged as electricity. Louisa has an admirer, Arthur, who may be from the future. Her father, a melancholy and also isolated man still grieving for his dead wife, desires to enter a time machine (built by a friend of his) and reunite with his dead wife.
Hunt's writing is sensuous and full of inner dialogue, blending aspects of psychology, philosophy, science, and science fiction. The characters are supple and vivid, but at times seem remote and stilted in relation to each other, even while their individual story lines overlap well and draw out the plot to its interesting conclusion.
The novel celebrates the luminous magic of science and nature and the inexplicable aspects of Time. The spirit of invention, in The Invention of Everything else, especially honors the life force itself. It does so with a bulging, beating heart.
Magical realism blends with scientific query and knowledge. It is 1943 at the New Yorker hotel, where Tesla lives in isolation and penury with his pigeons and his journal and his thoughts. He is fascinated by the mystery of homing pigeons, the fact that they consistently find their way home. He meets Louisa, an educated young chambermaid there, who shares his fascination with pigeons and has a coop she keeps at her home. They develop a fragile, compassionate, and intellectual relationship.
As the story unfolds, mysteries open to even larger mysteries, and time as a theme seems to have a current as charged as electricity. Louisa has an admirer, Arthur, who may be from the future. Her father, a melancholy and also isolated man still grieving for his dead wife, desires to enter a time machine (built by a friend of his) and reunite with his dead wife.
Hunt's writing is sensuous and full of inner dialogue, blending aspects of psychology, philosophy, science, and science fiction. The characters are supple and vivid, but at times seem remote and stilted in relation to each other, even while their individual story lines overlap well and draw out the plot to its interesting conclusion.
The novel celebrates the luminous magic of science and nature and the inexplicable aspects of Time. The spirit of invention, in The Invention of Everything else, especially honors the life force itself. It does so with a bulging, beating heart.
July 13, 2014
For the first 100 pages, I absolutely adored 'The Invention of Everything Else'. I was just waiting for things to come together, but the writing was beautiful and the setting and the details and the pigeons and Freddie. But the thing is, things never seemed really to get together for me. There were two plotlines, Tesla's and Louisa's and they weren't as interwoven as I'd have liked them to be. I started to realize this during the last 50 pages, where I understood that there was no time left to bring everything together.
So while the reading experience was quite magnificent, my final opinion is that it could have been better.
And now I'd like to read a really good book please, because I'm getting tired of all those almost-there books I've been reading lately.
So while the reading experience was quite magnificent, my final opinion is that it could have been better.
And now I'd like to read a really good book please, because I'm getting tired of all those almost-there books I've been reading lately.
April 15, 2016
I really didn't like Hunt's writing style. Some sentences seemed sloppily constructed where I had to read them again to understand what was being said. Her imagery focused on things like nose hair and peeling skin. So many odd, random, disconnected things were in here that didn't add to whatever plot there was. Did we need a scene of animal torture?? This is supposedly set in 1943 but I never felt that flavour in the text. If this is supposed to be a fictionalization biography of Tesla, I was too confused to glean much of his life. And then there was the insta-love with someone who very well could be your stalker. This should have been epic, but it was just not well done.
October 9, 2017
This sounds like such fun in theory.
I didn't like it. It's not that it's bad so much as it's boring. The plot of this is fragmented and hard to follow, and the characters aren't well enough developed to ensure that my brain engages enough to fill in any of the gaps.
The idea of a young girl befriending Nikola Tesla at the end of his life after he's become a recluse living in a New York hotel is charming.
This was just dull, in my opinion. You get random snapshots from Tesla's life, most of them from when he's quite young, some of which were interesting, but most of which seemed to highlight his desire not to have any relationships (not a particularly compelling trait). The notable exception is his relationship with a couple, whom he has some variation of undefined intense feelings for, but they show up for maybe three scenes. And then disappear. The modern-day stuff is even odder. There's very little to Louisa. I'd have trouble coming up with a single character trait of hers, beyond likes to snoop a bit in guests rooms, and worries about her slightly unstable father.
And the less said about the random (poorly defined) time-travel aspects, the better.
I can't help thinking Tesla would be a good subject for a novel - this isn't that novel. I think it would have been better either as a straight biography - it felt like the author didn't want to stray too far from the factual where Tesla was concerned, which seriously constrained her - or to take more liberties and develop the characters more. As it stands, this is a disappointment.
2017 Reading Challenge: A book from a genre/subgenre you've never heard of (mainly because I have no idea how to classify this - fictional biography, magical realism, just plain strange?)
I didn't like it. It's not that it's bad so much as it's boring. The plot of this is fragmented and hard to follow, and the characters aren't well enough developed to ensure that my brain engages enough to fill in any of the gaps.
The idea of a young girl befriending Nikola Tesla at the end of his life after he's become a recluse living in a New York hotel is charming.
This was just dull, in my opinion. You get random snapshots from Tesla's life, most of them from when he's quite young, some of which were interesting, but most of which seemed to highlight his desire not to have any relationships (not a particularly compelling trait). The notable exception is his relationship with a couple, whom he has some variation of undefined intense feelings for, but they show up for maybe three scenes. And then disappear. The modern-day stuff is even odder. There's very little to Louisa. I'd have trouble coming up with a single character trait of hers, beyond likes to snoop a bit in guests rooms, and worries about her slightly unstable father.
And the less said about the random (poorly defined) time-travel aspects, the better.
I can't help thinking Tesla would be a good subject for a novel - this isn't that novel. I think it would have been better either as a straight biography - it felt like the author didn't want to stray too far from the factual where Tesla was concerned, which seriously constrained her - or to take more liberties and develop the characters more. As it stands, this is a disappointment.
2017 Reading Challenge: A book from a genre/subgenre you've never heard of (mainly because I have no idea how to classify this - fictional biography, magical realism, just plain strange?)
May 13, 2016
I had a feeling that I would enjoy this book but I honestly did not think I would enjoy it as much as I did. Being one of those people that considers Nikola Tesla to be one of the most underrated inventors in the world, I was intrigued to see how Hunt would bring him and his story to life. And do you know what? I was not disappointed. She manages to note only bring the inventor to the fore but also the man himself, showing that there was so much more to him than 'just' AC electricity. The story does jump around a bit but Hunt handles this well, allowing the reader to follow Tesla's life through Louisa's discovery of his memoirs and her discussions with him which seems to give everything a more personal and more realistic feel. An utterly gripping, humourous and moving read.
April 15, 2019
samantha hunt makes me feel like anything is possible!
October 12, 2019
I am a physicist by training and wanted to like this book because it is about Tesla for whom I have a huge admiration (and who is honoured in science by having the unit measuring the strength of a magnetic field named after him). Furthermore, I don't like writing critical reviews and usually only review things I've liked, but with Vine you review what you receive and the truth is that I really disliked this book.
My main objection to it is the style, because it is so mannered, so overblown and so obviously striving for STYLE that it badly interferes with the story and development of character. Really brilliant writers like Wodehouse, Runyon, or Chandler, for example, can create a style which adds to, or even becomes more important than narrative. Sadly, Samantha Hunt is nowhere near that league and her attempt at individuality and quirkiness is simply irritating and very intrusive. For example, the opening of Chapter 2 begins, for no reason whatever, not just in the middle of a sentence but in the middle of a word, and turns out after more than two rather tedious pages to be a radio play which Louisa, a hitherto unknown character, is listening to. It's a pointless, uninteresting trick and simply annoyed me.
As another example, later in the chapter Louisa, goes to work in a hotel. This is described thus: "Through the pale esophagus of service passages, past the stomach that is the laundry...Louisa finds herself in the tiny gallbladder of the lady employees' changing room." The digestive tract is a clumsy, unnecessary and inappropriate metaphor for the hotel's corridors which contributes nothing to either our picture or understanding of the situation. And `gallbladder'? For heaven's sake! All this, coupled with a confused and fragmented structure (not to mention an attempt at magical realism), was too much for me, and I found the whole thing to be an over-written mish-mash which in the end wholly failed to engage me and added up to very little other than a desperate and rather poor attempt at chic writing.
Plainly others feel differently about this book, and many have enjoyed it. Another reviewer described the writing which I can't stand as "vibrant prose." Fair enough: tastes vary and anyone reading this review should read the other reviews too because like their authors you may enjoy it. I'm afraid that I certainly didn't.
My main objection to it is the style, because it is so mannered, so overblown and so obviously striving for STYLE that it badly interferes with the story and development of character. Really brilliant writers like Wodehouse, Runyon, or Chandler, for example, can create a style which adds to, or even becomes more important than narrative. Sadly, Samantha Hunt is nowhere near that league and her attempt at individuality and quirkiness is simply irritating and very intrusive. For example, the opening of Chapter 2 begins, for no reason whatever, not just in the middle of a sentence but in the middle of a word, and turns out after more than two rather tedious pages to be a radio play which Louisa, a hitherto unknown character, is listening to. It's a pointless, uninteresting trick and simply annoyed me.
As another example, later in the chapter Louisa, goes to work in a hotel. This is described thus: "Through the pale esophagus of service passages, past the stomach that is the laundry...Louisa finds herself in the tiny gallbladder of the lady employees' changing room." The digestive tract is a clumsy, unnecessary and inappropriate metaphor for the hotel's corridors which contributes nothing to either our picture or understanding of the situation. And `gallbladder'? For heaven's sake! All this, coupled with a confused and fragmented structure (not to mention an attempt at magical realism), was too much for me, and I found the whole thing to be an over-written mish-mash which in the end wholly failed to engage me and added up to very little other than a desperate and rather poor attempt at chic writing.
Plainly others feel differently about this book, and many have enjoyed it. Another reviewer described the writing which I can't stand as "vibrant prose." Fair enough: tastes vary and anyone reading this review should read the other reviews too because like their authors you may enjoy it. I'm afraid that I certainly didn't.
July 14, 2011
I had invented reasons not to like this book. Any woman who is on any list of fabulous under 35 raises my eyebrows. And my super-sensory fault-finding devices. It's historical fiction, which I claim not to like out loud regularly. I loved this book. The electricity that plays both a protagonist and antagonist role zizzes on every page. Tesla is wholly imagined, as though he is sitting in a chair next to you reading the book, correcting impressions, making suggestions. Louisa is human and otherwordly both. I tried to write this morning what is fantastic about the books that combine real:imagined; authors who come so close to defining what it is to be human and part of the Great All at the same time. John Crowley in Aegypt. Mieville in everything he writes. And Samantha Hunt with this book. The title is brilliant, the prose creates the world of this book like The Matrix. Characters can choose to believe in what's real, or can choose to believe real is defined by different rules entirely. Real is in the eye of the reader. Hunt clearly admires Tesla, and likes the people she writes about. And I do too. Throughout there is a brilliant metaphor regarding homing pigeons. Brilliant. Hunt is a storyweaver, wrapping the reader in the finished product like a magical:scientific cloak.
December 8, 2015
I feel fondly toward this novel. It had some winning fictional and historical characters (Tesla, Edison, Samuel Clemens, Westinghouse, Alfred Nobel) and a romantic setting at the old New Yorker hotel, and historical interest (and accuracy, according to an interview with an author), and some very fine writing ("Arthur is like a glass vase toppled off the windowsill. He's busted into a hundred distracting shards. He's a little scary, confusing her, reflecting light into her eyes from over there and over there and over there. He's got the ground covered and it seems a sliver of him has already cut right through the toughest skin of her heel"), and of course, time travel.
November 28, 2008
“The Invention of Everything Else” was a beautifully written story – the kind of story that I would aspire to writing because it so masterfully combines lovely imagery with brilliant and inspiring ideas: it is both a poem and a philosophy, a soul and a story, depicting love, life, and all of the most touching interstices therein.
September 30, 2018
Şu an için Tesla kitabın çok az bir bölümünde yer almasına rağmen (Türkiye'de kitabın basım adı Tesla'nın Kutusu sırf bu sebeple insan daha fazla Tesla bekliyor.) tüm karakterler hakkındaki gelişmeleri merakla bekliyorum. Azor nereden çıktı, Zaman Makina'sı mı, yok artık.. Arthur ile Luisa evlenecek mi, nasıl yani.. Walter hafif kafadan sıyrık mı? Merak, merak, merak...
Edit:
Herkesin Tesla'nın biyografisini okuduğu sıcak Mayıs ayında, biraz farklı olmak adına, biraz da adının ve arka kapağının ilgimi oldukça çekmesi sebebiyle, ben Tesla'nın Kutusu'nu seçerek farklı bir bakış açısına sahip olmak istedim. Öncelikle, kitaba başlamadan evvel Tesla hakkında bilgim oldukça kısıtlıydı. Edison ile birlikte elektriğin babası olduklarını söyleyebilirdim sadece... Kitap sonrası, içeriği sayesinde bilgi birikimim epey arttı diyemem ama ilgim sebebiyle pek çok şey öğrendim. Günümüz dünyasında, herkesin şükranlık duyması gereken Tesla'nın çoğu kişide farkındalık yaratmamış olmasına üzülüyor ve şaşırıyorum. Günümüz teknolojisi alternatif akımın, alternatif akım Tesla'nın ürünü...
Kitapla ilgili ilk eleştirim tabi ki adı ve kapağı; Tesla'nın kutusu diye bir kitap elinize aldığınzda, arka yazıda Tesla hakkında detaylar ile özendirildiğinizde ve kapakta fosforlu, kabartmayla pembe renkli bir Tesla silüeti gördüğünüzde, takdir edersiniz ki buram buram Tesla kokan bir roman bekliyorsunuz. Ama hayır, tam olarak öyle ilerlemiyor kitap. Tesla ana karakterlerden biri, evet. Ama Louisa, babası Walter, bir anda kitaba giren Arthur, babasının arkadaşı Azor ve dahiyane fikirleri Tesla'yı oldukça geri plana atıyor.
Tesla'ya eşlik eden Edison, Westinghouse, Twain gibi karakterler kitabı renklendiriyor. Romanlardaki gerçek karakterler, eser ile daha sıkı bir bağ kurmama hep daha fazla imkan sağlıyor. Burada da, özellikle Edison ile olan ikili rekabetiyle oldukça iyi sağlanıyor.
Gerçek ve yaratı karakterler ile Zaman Makinesi konusunun işlenmesi kitabı oldukça çekici kılıyor, en azından fikirde... Düşünsenize, çağının ötesindeki mucit Tesla ve Zaman Makinesi, bu hikaye uçurulur diye düşünüyorsun. Ama çeviriden midir bilemiyorum, iyi başlayan kitap bir süre sonra akmıyor, sayfalar zor çevriliyor. Biraz önce eleştirdiğim,paralelde ilerleyen diğer hikayenin kahramanları, ilk hayal kırıklığını yıktığınızda, kitabı daha fazla sürükler konumda oluyor. Öyle ki; Louisa ve Arthur arasında yaratılan kimya, Azor'un süper sonik fikirleri ve Walter'ın saf iç güzelliği Tesla'yı solluyor. Ama değinmeden edemediğim bir konu daha var ki, Tesla ve güvercinler ile ilişkisi, kitap güvercinleri daha fazla merak etmeme sebep oldu ve yazarın güvercini / güvercinleri kimliklendirmesi oldukça hoşuma gitti.
Özetlemek gerekirse; Tesla'nın Kutusu, saf bir Tesla kaynağı değil. Hatta Tesla hakkında verdiği bilgiler doğrudur da diyemem. Karakterleri oldukça eğlenceli yaratılmış. Tesla'nın da bir karakter olarak yer aldığı düşünülerek okunduğunda hayal kırıklığı yaratmayacağını umduğum; tarihi, bilim kurgu türünde bir roman olarak güncel rakipleri ile kıyaslandığında vasatın üzerinde kalan ancak daha da ileriye gitmeyen bir eser. Ben cep boyunu okuduğum için yanında taşınabilecek ebatlarda olması kitabı daha da okunur kılıyor. Yaz akşamlarında, kafa yormadan okunabilecek türden bir eser olmasıyla birlikte, yarıda bırakıp bırakmayacağınıza da emin olmadığım bir eser açıkçası. Bir denemek lazım...
Edit:
Herkesin Tesla'nın biyografisini okuduğu sıcak Mayıs ayında, biraz farklı olmak adına, biraz da adının ve arka kapağının ilgimi oldukça çekmesi sebebiyle, ben Tesla'nın Kutusu'nu seçerek farklı bir bakış açısına sahip olmak istedim. Öncelikle, kitaba başlamadan evvel Tesla hakkında bilgim oldukça kısıtlıydı. Edison ile birlikte elektriğin babası olduklarını söyleyebilirdim sadece... Kitap sonrası, içeriği sayesinde bilgi birikimim epey arttı diyemem ama ilgim sebebiyle pek çok şey öğrendim. Günümüz dünyasında, herkesin şükranlık duyması gereken Tesla'nın çoğu kişide farkındalık yaratmamış olmasına üzülüyor ve şaşırıyorum. Günümüz teknolojisi alternatif akımın, alternatif akım Tesla'nın ürünü...
Kitapla ilgili ilk eleştirim tabi ki adı ve kapağı; Tesla'nın kutusu diye bir kitap elinize aldığınzda, arka yazıda Tesla hakkında detaylar ile özendirildiğinizde ve kapakta fosforlu, kabartmayla pembe renkli bir Tesla silüeti gördüğünüzde, takdir edersiniz ki buram buram Tesla kokan bir roman bekliyorsunuz. Ama hayır, tam olarak öyle ilerlemiyor kitap. Tesla ana karakterlerden biri, evet. Ama Louisa, babası Walter, bir anda kitaba giren Arthur, babasının arkadaşı Azor ve dahiyane fikirleri Tesla'yı oldukça geri plana atıyor.
Tesla'ya eşlik eden Edison, Westinghouse, Twain gibi karakterler kitabı renklendiriyor. Romanlardaki gerçek karakterler, eser ile daha sıkı bir bağ kurmama hep daha fazla imkan sağlıyor. Burada da, özellikle Edison ile olan ikili rekabetiyle oldukça iyi sağlanıyor.
Gerçek ve yaratı karakterler ile Zaman Makinesi konusunun işlenmesi kitabı oldukça çekici kılıyor, en azından fikirde... Düşünsenize, çağının ötesindeki mucit Tesla ve Zaman Makinesi, bu hikaye uçurulur diye düşünüyorsun. Ama çeviriden midir bilemiyorum, iyi başlayan kitap bir süre sonra akmıyor, sayfalar zor çevriliyor. Biraz önce eleştirdiğim,paralelde ilerleyen diğer hikayenin kahramanları, ilk hayal kırıklığını yıktığınızda, kitabı daha fazla sürükler konumda oluyor. Öyle ki; Louisa ve Arthur arasında yaratılan kimya, Azor'un süper sonik fikirleri ve Walter'ın saf iç güzelliği Tesla'yı solluyor. Ama değinmeden edemediğim bir konu daha var ki, Tesla ve güvercinler ile ilişkisi, kitap güvercinleri daha fazla merak etmeme sebep oldu ve yazarın güvercini / güvercinleri kimliklendirmesi oldukça hoşuma gitti.
Özetlemek gerekirse; Tesla'nın Kutusu, saf bir Tesla kaynağı değil. Hatta Tesla hakkında verdiği bilgiler doğrudur da diyemem. Karakterleri oldukça eğlenceli yaratılmış. Tesla'nın da bir karakter olarak yer aldığı düşünülerek okunduğunda hayal kırıklığı yaratmayacağını umduğum; tarihi, bilim kurgu türünde bir roman olarak güncel rakipleri ile kıyaslandığında vasatın üzerinde kalan ancak daha da ileriye gitmeyen bir eser. Ben cep boyunu okuduğum için yanında taşınabilecek ebatlarda olması kitabı daha da okunur kılıyor. Yaz akşamlarında, kafa yormadan okunabilecek türden bir eser olmasıyla birlikte, yarıda bırakıp bırakmayacağınıza da emin olmadığım bir eser açıkçası. Bir denemek lazım...
July 23, 2021
I really wanted to love this book. It’s ambitious and fascinating. It animates a dynamic time in American history—the early part of the 20th century, the harnessing of electricity, the battles of industrial titans to win the DC versus AC war, the life of New York society and grand old hotels. It creates an intimate portrait of Nikola Tesla, a brilliant, misunderstood and clearly under-appreciated genius who gave us so much and got little in return.
The opening paragraphs are excellent evocations of the genius and wonder of a boy with a special affinity for natural phenomena and a wild imagination:
“Lightning first, then the thunder. And in between the two I’m reminded of a secret. I was a boy and there was a storm. The storm said something muffled. Try and catch me, perhaps, and then it bent down close to my ear in the very same way my brother Dane used to do. Whispering. A hot, damp breath, a tunnel between his mouth and my ear. The storm began to speak. You want to know what the storm said? Listen.”
Then it moves on to possibly the most imaginative passage about dust in the literary canon.
As a multiple POV and multiple plotline book, the supporting characters have their charm, but Tesla is rightly the star of the show. His oddness is well inhabited, even relatable. He is a fully drawn character.
The author tries several ways to answer the novelistic challenge of to whom the narrator speaks. Chapter 1 uses the second person, so we follow along to discover who this “you” is. Is it me, the reader? Is it someone else? For several chapters, Tesla seems to be dictating his memoirs to “Sam,” whom we see in a later dinner party scene, introduced as a dear friend. We don’t learn who Sam really is until near the end of the book, too late to land as a delight or a surprise. Louisa the hotel chamber maid’s chapters are in close third person, while Tesla’s are in first person. Some of his story is dramatized via memoir pages that Louisa reads while snooping in his hotel room.
Hunt takes us through the history via Tesla’s story: massive investments in R&D and infrastructure, capitalists who demand a return on their investment. Tesla could see the eventual harnessing of free electromagnetic energy, just as he saw radio waves. This is astonishing to think about, particularly since we have yet to do the former on a practical scale. Is this because electric companies would go out of business, if we all had the ability to harness free energy for, well, for free?
The supporting characters come across more as two-dimensional props than fully rounded people. In chapter 6, for example, Louisa’s father Walter is the POV character. One wonders if this is so we can “experience” his long-ago courtship of his beloved late wife Freddie, Louisa’s mother. If so, its connection to the main story about Tesla is tenuous at best. Sure, it’s background for Louisa’s story and feeds the time-travel subplot, but it contributes nothing to Tesla’s.
Hunt dramatizes scenes that have little impact, for example a woman in West Orange trying to lure her missing cat home with a dish of milk. In the next scene, we go inside Edison’s lab to see his psychopathic crew electrocuting cats and puppies to practice their public demonstration against AC current. That scene is well done and horrific. The cat’s owner adds nothing.
The time travel storyline doesn’t seem to fit in a story about Nikola Tesla. At first, it’s too timid and drawn out, which slows down the main plot. When Louisa’s boyfriend Arthur says “Poor Penn Station” in chapter 10, confusing Louisa and this reader, he offers no explanation. So, is he from the future, instead of Tesla, as people theorize? The book never elaborates or revisits this odd moment, and this one breadcrumb provides no momentum in the story.
Hunt’s method of interweaving Tesla’s and Louisa’s stories plays out, for example, in chapters 10 and 11. Louisa and Arthur take the train to Shoreham to release pigeons. Supposedly acting on intuition, Louisa chooses to do it near an old derelict brick building. In the next chapter, Tesla narrates the choice of Shoreham for his final sad failure of a project, Wardenclyffe. The details are interesting—building designed by Stanford White, project financed inadequately by J.P. Morgan—but the coincidence isn’t all that satisfying. One wonders why bother.
In a late scene, “Sam” visits Tesla in his 1943 hotel room. They try an experiment where Sam tells Tesla what memory Tesla is having in that moment. It’s pretty cool (if baffling), until we learn soon after that Sam (Tesla’s real-life friend Mark Twain) died decades earlier. So, was this a demonstration of Tesla’s over-active imagination? Or is he crazy? Or senile? I suppose the idea is to leave that speculation up to the reader, but it lands as yet another fragmentary detail of unfocused storytelling.
There are two main reasons for my disappointment in this book. One is that the subplot of time travel steals the focus from Tesla’s story, which is marvelous enough on its own. To write this subplot required several characters besides Louisa: her father Walter, his friend Azor, and Arthur the boyfriend. Whether they are fully three-dimensional characters may be debatable, but their storyline adds nothing to the Tesla main story.
Why time travel? True, a novel like this is itself a form of time travel. But it’s not something Tesla worked on. As written here, he scoffed at it several times. He was rooted in the magic and wonder of this physical world. Sure, some people thought he might be from the future, but is that reason enough to create this whole subplot?
The other reason I didn’t love the book is that the research shows too much and slows down the story. Some passages of historical details read more like a Wikipedia entry than a novel. True, some scenes do come alive, like the costumes at the “Poverty Ball”. (WTF, millionaires!? Yet more proof that nothing changes.) Often, though, characters are overly manipulated by the author to show off historical details. An example: when Louisa, insane with grief over her father’s sudden death, runs to the hotel with an obsessive idea to get Tesla to revive him with his death ray, I’m all in. This is nuts, let’s go. But then she stops to look in on a famous singer Johnny Long performing in the Hotel New Yorker’s grand ballroom. She lingers to notice bellhops listening to a particular song, “Moonlight on the Ganges,” and try out their fox-trot moves. No way! These very concrete details feel like a research dump during Louisa’s desperation and panic. It brings the emotion and drama of that scene to a screeching halt and kills the momentum.
The novel at its best dramatizes the push-pull between pure science and capitalism. On the one hand, free enterprise encourages bold risk-taking. On the other, it exposes talented inventors like Tesla to exploitation and theft of their ideas. Hunt includes the military menace, the spies and warmongers who would pervert well-intentioned inventions for destructive, even deadly ends. These themes are still relevant today, as billionaires engage in their own space race while people are unhoused and starving, while the planet burns. Having observed this era so closely, it would be interesting for Hunt's characters to illuminate a potential way out of the capitalist shackles that keep us repeating the same mistakes a hundred years later.
The opening paragraphs are excellent evocations of the genius and wonder of a boy with a special affinity for natural phenomena and a wild imagination:
“Lightning first, then the thunder. And in between the two I’m reminded of a secret. I was a boy and there was a storm. The storm said something muffled. Try and catch me, perhaps, and then it bent down close to my ear in the very same way my brother Dane used to do. Whispering. A hot, damp breath, a tunnel between his mouth and my ear. The storm began to speak. You want to know what the storm said? Listen.”
Then it moves on to possibly the most imaginative passage about dust in the literary canon.
As a multiple POV and multiple plotline book, the supporting characters have their charm, but Tesla is rightly the star of the show. His oddness is well inhabited, even relatable. He is a fully drawn character.
The author tries several ways to answer the novelistic challenge of to whom the narrator speaks. Chapter 1 uses the second person, so we follow along to discover who this “you” is. Is it me, the reader? Is it someone else? For several chapters, Tesla seems to be dictating his memoirs to “Sam,” whom we see in a later dinner party scene, introduced as a dear friend. We don’t learn who Sam really is until near the end of the book, too late to land as a delight or a surprise. Louisa the hotel chamber maid’s chapters are in close third person, while Tesla’s are in first person. Some of his story is dramatized via memoir pages that Louisa reads while snooping in his hotel room.
Hunt takes us through the history via Tesla’s story: massive investments in R&D and infrastructure, capitalists who demand a return on their investment. Tesla could see the eventual harnessing of free electromagnetic energy, just as he saw radio waves. This is astonishing to think about, particularly since we have yet to do the former on a practical scale. Is this because electric companies would go out of business, if we all had the ability to harness free energy for, well, for free?
The supporting characters come across more as two-dimensional props than fully rounded people. In chapter 6, for example, Louisa’s father Walter is the POV character. One wonders if this is so we can “experience” his long-ago courtship of his beloved late wife Freddie, Louisa’s mother. If so, its connection to the main story about Tesla is tenuous at best. Sure, it’s background for Louisa’s story and feeds the time-travel subplot, but it contributes nothing to Tesla’s.
Hunt dramatizes scenes that have little impact, for example a woman in West Orange trying to lure her missing cat home with a dish of milk. In the next scene, we go inside Edison’s lab to see his psychopathic crew electrocuting cats and puppies to practice their public demonstration against AC current. That scene is well done and horrific. The cat’s owner adds nothing.
The time travel storyline doesn’t seem to fit in a story about Nikola Tesla. At first, it’s too timid and drawn out, which slows down the main plot. When Louisa’s boyfriend Arthur says “Poor Penn Station” in chapter 10, confusing Louisa and this reader, he offers no explanation. So, is he from the future, instead of Tesla, as people theorize? The book never elaborates or revisits this odd moment, and this one breadcrumb provides no momentum in the story.
Hunt’s method of interweaving Tesla’s and Louisa’s stories plays out, for example, in chapters 10 and 11. Louisa and Arthur take the train to Shoreham to release pigeons. Supposedly acting on intuition, Louisa chooses to do it near an old derelict brick building. In the next chapter, Tesla narrates the choice of Shoreham for his final sad failure of a project, Wardenclyffe. The details are interesting—building designed by Stanford White, project financed inadequately by J.P. Morgan—but the coincidence isn’t all that satisfying. One wonders why bother.
In a late scene, “Sam” visits Tesla in his 1943 hotel room. They try an experiment where Sam tells Tesla what memory Tesla is having in that moment. It’s pretty cool (if baffling), until we learn soon after that Sam (Tesla’s real-life friend Mark Twain) died decades earlier. So, was this a demonstration of Tesla’s over-active imagination? Or is he crazy? Or senile? I suppose the idea is to leave that speculation up to the reader, but it lands as yet another fragmentary detail of unfocused storytelling.
There are two main reasons for my disappointment in this book. One is that the subplot of time travel steals the focus from Tesla’s story, which is marvelous enough on its own. To write this subplot required several characters besides Louisa: her father Walter, his friend Azor, and Arthur the boyfriend. Whether they are fully three-dimensional characters may be debatable, but their storyline adds nothing to the Tesla main story.
Why time travel? True, a novel like this is itself a form of time travel. But it’s not something Tesla worked on. As written here, he scoffed at it several times. He was rooted in the magic and wonder of this physical world. Sure, some people thought he might be from the future, but is that reason enough to create this whole subplot?
The other reason I didn’t love the book is that the research shows too much and slows down the story. Some passages of historical details read more like a Wikipedia entry than a novel. True, some scenes do come alive, like the costumes at the “Poverty Ball”. (WTF, millionaires!? Yet more proof that nothing changes.) Often, though, characters are overly manipulated by the author to show off historical details. An example: when Louisa, insane with grief over her father’s sudden death, runs to the hotel with an obsessive idea to get Tesla to revive him with his death ray, I’m all in. This is nuts, let’s go. But then she stops to look in on a famous singer Johnny Long performing in the Hotel New Yorker’s grand ballroom. She lingers to notice bellhops listening to a particular song, “Moonlight on the Ganges,” and try out their fox-trot moves. No way! These very concrete details feel like a research dump during Louisa’s desperation and panic. It brings the emotion and drama of that scene to a screeching halt and kills the momentum.
The novel at its best dramatizes the push-pull between pure science and capitalism. On the one hand, free enterprise encourages bold risk-taking. On the other, it exposes talented inventors like Tesla to exploitation and theft of their ideas. Hunt includes the military menace, the spies and warmongers who would pervert well-intentioned inventions for destructive, even deadly ends. These themes are still relevant today, as billionaires engage in their own space race while people are unhoused and starving, while the planet burns. Having observed this era so closely, it would be interesting for Hunt's characters to illuminate a potential way out of the capitalist shackles that keep us repeating the same mistakes a hundred years later.
September 9, 2016
A engaging book that fails miserably in its final act.
Nikola Tesla, rival of Thomas Edison, inventor of AC electricity, radio and host of other wonders we take for granted today, is in the waning years of his life living in the Hotel New Yorker. Louisa is a spunky, bright chambermaid curious about the hotel’s guests and Telsa in particular. The two bond over a love of pigeons, and Telsa’s fascinating history is revealed. Loved the first half. Beautifully written in a style perfectly suited to the era—the early 1900s.
In the second half of the book the narrative shifts toward a wacky inventor of a time machine. The early ties of this narrative to Telsa, who was also considered crazy at times, are promising. The message seems to be in an age when scientific discovery and novel invention were progressing at an astounding pace, and the merchandising of science ala Edison was just beginning, recognizing true genius would have been difficult, the public easily fooled by charlatans with a good pitch.
Had the book progressed along this line and continued to focus on the relationship between Tesla and Louisa Invention would have been four star read. Instead the author makes the bizarre plot choice in the final act to make the time machine real injecting a weak sci-fi element completely out of character with the first three-quarters of the book and at odds with the central theme that true genius is rare and rarely appreciated. Terrible, terrible choice. Ruined the book for me.
Four stars for the first half. Three-ish for the next quarter. Zero for the ending. On my buy, borrow, skip scale: Skip. Read Tesla’s story elsewhere.
Nikola Tesla, rival of Thomas Edison, inventor of AC electricity, radio and host of other wonders we take for granted today, is in the waning years of his life living in the Hotel New Yorker. Louisa is a spunky, bright chambermaid curious about the hotel’s guests and Telsa in particular. The two bond over a love of pigeons, and Telsa’s fascinating history is revealed. Loved the first half. Beautifully written in a style perfectly suited to the era—the early 1900s.
In the second half of the book the narrative shifts toward a wacky inventor of a time machine. The early ties of this narrative to Telsa, who was also considered crazy at times, are promising. The message seems to be in an age when scientific discovery and novel invention were progressing at an astounding pace, and the merchandising of science ala Edison was just beginning, recognizing true genius would have been difficult, the public easily fooled by charlatans with a good pitch.
Had the book progressed along this line and continued to focus on the relationship between Tesla and Louisa Invention would have been four star read. Instead the author makes the bizarre plot choice in the final act to make the time machine real injecting a weak sci-fi element completely out of character with the first three-quarters of the book and at odds with the central theme that true genius is rare and rarely appreciated. Terrible, terrible choice. Ruined the book for me.
Four stars for the first half. Three-ish for the next quarter. Zero for the ending. On my buy, borrow, skip scale: Skip. Read Tesla’s story elsewhere.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 13, 2017
This is, well, it's hard to review this book because it was hard to care, honestly. The Author wove a story about Tesla and Time Travel, and the two, well... they didn't make sense together. Tesla comes across bumbling, as we focus on his stilted social skills and his failures, as we watch him, old and addled, in love with a pigeon. Louisa, the maid who "befriends" him, feels nebulous as a character. Her storyline is barely altered by her friendship, made up mostly of her being caught snooping in Tesla's room and not being reprimanded in any way. Her inevitable love story is with an even more unfleshed character. Even so, it is clear the actual plot revolves around Louisa and her father. Tesla's story is added in in the same way Louisa learns it... as voyeurism, as inserted anecdote. The book almost feels like two attempted stories, a historical fiction about Tesla and a period piece about the uncertainties of burgeoning scientific advances, were mashed into one. Tesla's focus on pigeons, despite being a real eccentricity, makes him feel even more unreal, even more inserted and unintegrated. It feels like hearing a story from one friend while another keeps trying to talk about Nikola Tesla. None of the Tesla threads, snippets of life as they were, seemed to tie up. Other aspects, such as the "interrogation" interludes between some chapters, don't really add up to enough to justify the conceit. By the end, a lot of things feel like filler, while the integral parts feel like bones.
September 14, 2020
I wasn’t exactly sure of what I read. There is Tesla, a maid at the hotel who likes pigeons as much as he does, she likes to snoop, there’s her stalker who seems a little confused about when he is, her father who lost his wife in childbirth and would dearly like to see her again, and her uncle who seems to have invented a time machine using some of Tesla’s concepts.
I like Tesla. I don’t think you can have a background in science and not admire him. The book concentrated on 7 days of his life, the last seven, and then added Luisa and her father and her uncle and her stalker into the mix, while Tesla is just... there. Oh sure, he has his Gloria Swanson moments, but his story is backstory, making hardly any sense because he’s talking to pigeons maybe, and is seeing people who have been dead for a decade. This is Tesla at his most vulnerable, which would have been okay if there was more to him.
There isn’t. Or maybe there’s a deeper connection to him and Walter and Arthur and Luisa and I missed it because I was too busy being bored, but in any case it’s not a book that caught my interest at all. It’s a pity because I like Samantha Hunt, and I love the concept of time travel and I like Tesla.
I like Tesla. I don’t think you can have a background in science and not admire him. The book concentrated on 7 days of his life, the last seven, and then added Luisa and her father and her uncle and her stalker into the mix, while Tesla is just... there. Oh sure, he has his Gloria Swanson moments, but his story is backstory, making hardly any sense because he’s talking to pigeons maybe, and is seeing people who have been dead for a decade. This is Tesla at his most vulnerable, which would have been okay if there was more to him.
There isn’t. Or maybe there’s a deeper connection to him and Walter and Arthur and Luisa and I missed it because I was too busy being bored, but in any case it’s not a book that caught my interest at all. It’s a pity because I like Samantha Hunt, and I love the concept of time travel and I like Tesla.
February 8, 2009
An astonishingly beautiful evocation of 1940s New York City, and the last days of Nikola Tesla, as befriended by Louisa, a chambermaid in the Hotel New Yorker. Poignant and gorgeously told, with an honest enthusiasm for the age of invention, brought to a screeching close by the advent of corporations and the commodification of the natural world. Hunt manages to bring Tesla to life through his interactions with Louisa, his long-term relationship with a pet pigeon, and his letters to Samuel Clemens. Science and imagination become one through Tesla's extraordinary mind, and one can't help but wonder how he has been forgotten in American history, and rejoice that such a novel can bring him back, if only briefly. (Full review at
Lit Mob
.)
March 26, 2008
"Everybody steals in commerce and industry. I've stolen a lot myself. But I know how to steal." Thomas Edison
An understatement, to say the least.
I'm a few chapters into this marvelously imagined and deftly written novel, which pivots around extraordinary inventor Nikola Tesla - a man clearly more interested in the landscape of ideas than receiving fame or credit for his inventions - and an unlikely relationship that develops with a young chambermaid. Pigeons feature prominently. A brilliant read so far.
Read this book!
An understatement, to say the least.
I'm a few chapters into this marvelously imagined and deftly written novel, which pivots around extraordinary inventor Nikola Tesla - a man clearly more interested in the landscape of ideas than receiving fame or credit for his inventions - and an unlikely relationship that develops with a young chambermaid. Pigeons feature prominently. A brilliant read so far.
Read this book!
October 16, 2022
Yes, books are full of words but this book is absolutely claustrophobic with them. There's no room to breathe among the disembodied voices, pointless descriptions, and hyperactive environment. You feel unable to process one element before being swept along to the next (or suffering through it), and ultimately drown in the telling.
Would prefer just to read a biography of Tesla.
Would prefer just to read a biography of Tesla.
June 27, 2008
This book really whetted my appetite to learn more about Tesla. What a fascinating man. I wish he were here with us today to help solve the energy crises. Hunt's book is fanciful, entertaining, well-researched and well-written.
June 19, 2019
Didn't f*@k me up quite as much as The Seas did but it was a great story and very beautiful writing.
August 25, 2020
This novel is a love letter... Several, in fact. It is an ode to the genius Nikola Tesla; an affair with early 1900s New York City; tales of tenderness between a husband and a wife, a father and a a daughter, best friends, a man and a woman, an unrequited love, and true love between a man and his bird; a flirtation with possibility.
Samantha Hunt has a way with words and emotions. She transports you to a place where you can believe in magic... More than that, though, where you actively seek it out for yourself.
She manages to weave several stories, meandering through the years and lives of separate characters, tying up no loose ends neatly, picking up and dropping off at a whim, mixing fact and fantasy, and still creates a beautiful, solid, gratifying whole.
Immersed in her story, I felt that absolutely anything was possible. Much like Tesla, I imagine.
Samantha Hunt has a way with words and emotions. She transports you to a place where you can believe in magic... More than that, though, where you actively seek it out for yourself.
She manages to weave several stories, meandering through the years and lives of separate characters, tying up no loose ends neatly, picking up and dropping off at a whim, mixing fact and fantasy, and still creates a beautiful, solid, gratifying whole.
Immersed in her story, I felt that absolutely anything was possible. Much like Tesla, I imagine.
September 7, 2022
Historical fiction about Tesla featuring time travel...
what's not to love?
There's definitely some less than lovable parts to this novel, and I vacillated between 3-4 stars. The writing is uneven. Some of the storylines did not engage me at all, and the use of present tense in writing about the protagonist grated on my nerves. I wanted it to be a clever device relating to the time travel element of the story, but if that was the intention it missed the mark.
I decided to rate it 4 stars in the end because there are some really beautiful passages, and the character development of both the historical figures and invented characters is compelling. It was (mostly) wonderful to spend these hours with Tesla and his pigeons and his ghosts.
what's not to love?
There's definitely some less than lovable parts to this novel, and I vacillated between 3-4 stars. The writing is uneven. Some of the storylines did not engage me at all, and the use of present tense in writing about the protagonist grated on my nerves. I wanted it to be a clever device relating to the time travel element of the story, but if that was the intention it missed the mark.
I decided to rate it 4 stars in the end because there are some really beautiful passages, and the character development of both the historical figures and invented characters is compelling. It was (mostly) wonderful to spend these hours with Tesla and his pigeons and his ghosts.
January 22, 2019
I didn't enjoy this one as much as I've enjoyed Hunt's other work. The premise seemed neat, but the writing just didn't do it for me consistently. It was similar to Lydia Millet's Oh Pure and Radiant Heart (time travel, the great scientific minds of the nuclear era, birds, the potential destruction of humanity), which I also didn't much like, so maybe there's something about this very specific story type that I'm just predisposed to feel meh about. It's a fine book, it just didn't tick every box for me.
July 23, 2020
I thought I'd like this book, but I didn't really expect to love it. Yet love it I did. I loved how every page seemed to procure something unexpected. I loved the reminder that what is now perceived as ordinary (that is, electricity) was once extraordinary, and I loved the pure enthusiasm the characters felt towards the world and towards each other. This book is in fact very much about love, in the form of curiousity and wonder and the mysteries of the mundane, and I was utterly smitten.
"The candles have just been lit. Everything, everyone, is as they should be, filled with life, filled with secrets for unraveling. Tonight I could fall in love with each and every one of them. I could fall in love with the whole glittering world."
"The candles have just been lit. Everything, everyone, is as they should be, filled with life, filled with secrets for unraveling. Tonight I could fall in love with each and every one of them. I could fall in love with the whole glittering world."
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