The Horizontal Instrument: A Novel Of Love Memory And The Quest To Measure Time

by Christopher Wilkins

Watchmaker Robert Garret's wife has died from a slow disease which destroyed the mind he loved before it destroyed her body. Now he will honour her by constructing a fitting memorial: a perfectly accurate timepiece. Can such a device ever exist?

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary

288 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1999

Reviews

[Raven · Rating 4 out of 5]

Upon finishing this I thought it was an interesting take on love, loss and grief about a man who losses his wife to dementia. At first it read like a book about time and timepieces interspersed with bits of the story but after awhile it became moments of introspective reflections on perspective, time, memory and how they are connected again interspersed with more of the story reading like two separate books in the one, yet fluidly moving within the two, until the two became the one and ended in a complete story that was quite heartbreaking probably even more so because of Wilkins’ writing style made it feel like someone was actually talking to you about their loss and their thoughts on that loss.

[jrendocrine at least reading is good · Rating 2 out of 5]

2 books in one - a) man marries woman, she has early alzheimers and he watches her waste away while he remains quiet and disconnected from anybody and anything, b) we learn about watches, especially patek phillipe watches. somehow we are supposed to connect that time is a construct, and the only time we can know is present time - past being remembered, and future being unknown. I'm not sure what to do about this, though I was interested in the watches. It would be nice to have a Patek Phillipe watch, but I don't have 250K - 11M+ set aside for that purpose.

[Roxanne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Horizontal Instrument was filled with horology, romance, horology, grief, horology, life. I found it a bit annoying in the beginning when he would go on to describing the process of watch making and then go on to the main story, alternating every chapter... after a while though, i got more interested and a lot used to it. There were so many things that he had said that i found myself nodding to. Since i was a trying to understand the terms he was using for the tools and processes of making a watch, i couldn't keep my head in to the actual story.

Time, though, was something that Wilkins made me understand a lot more.

[Wenbin Yeo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Adds a new perspective on a typical romance genre, albeit depressing as it is. A little too much technical jargon on holology, but maybe that just goes to show the vastly different world in which he inhabits, that of the known and predictable against that of the unpredictable.

[K M · Rating 3 out of 5]

The chapters about Robert and Elizabeth were very engaging, but my attention often strayed during the parts dealing with the watchmaking. I did end up skipping some of these parts, anxious to continue reading Elizabeth's story.

[María Domínguez · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful book. Extremely well crafted just like a watch. I particularly liked the division of chapters aligning side by side the deterioration of his wife´s mind with the construction of a perfect watch.

[tina byrne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nerdy and tragic.