The Chemistry of Tears by Peter Carey

It was one of the airport picks of a book. Actually, I do not pick books at airports, because I have an Amazon Kindle. So, it was one of these airport decisions then, to download and read Peter Carey's The Chemistry of Tears. There was a whole line up of reviews recently in the news and as I remembered the story was set in a clock making museum, I already liked the setting. Hologerie was one of my first jobs many years ago at Bosch. I was sharing the office with one of the last of its kind, who has been in the clock business in South Africa, where he left to as a teenager. In his 60s he returned to Germany and bridged a few years to retirement taking care of our clocks installed at train stations and airports, which were still under the name Telenorma. I was actually in the Security Technology division, but I was told that I might be the only one who can bear sharing the office with him because he was so odd. What I found was that he was a kind, educated man, who had things to tell but was not eager to shout them out loud. He taught me everything he knew about clocks. We were the last ones having certain spare parts for old clock towers. And of course we were loosing money with that line of business, but I gained a lot from "negotiating" with German village priests the price of repairing his church's clock-tower. And last but not least it was smuggling gold in the form of hand made movement parts though Africa - the customs people never guessed that some of these mechanical parts deep built into the movements of these industrial clocks, leaving the country, were made of gold and even containing diamonds. By this the world of clock making became for me a world of absolute precision and great adventure at the same time. This was about 20 years ago.

The Chemistry of Tears is the first book of Peter Carey I read. I guessed that it means that humans are chemical machines, where one process drives the other - like in a clockwork. But then of course also they are not - or at least they are complex enough not just to be a movement. Mostly they don't like the idea of being one anyways. Even I find they are predictable. The plot starts with a fictional Catherine Gehrig an, horologist at the Swinburne museum in London, who comes to the office to find her lover died. It is weaved in with the story of Henry Blanding, a Victorian gentleman, who a century earlier travelled to the Black Forest to have a giant "magical instrument" constructed, which is a clock in the shape of a duck, for the amusement of his dying son. Henry meets the two brothers who became most famous in Germany for their collection of fairy tales (which is a bit strange because I thought they mainly worked in Northern Germany). The two streams of the novel meet when Catherine, who is forced to mourn the loss of her lover in secret, reads the notebooks of Henry from a century before, while taking up the restoration of the duck shaped clock. 

It is an interesting way of discussing death, and the machinery of life - or is it not? Somehow, I did not fully enjoy the language Carey choose and found the book a bit dragging on in the end. But a good airport pick, when you need just something to read, think about and detach you from the reality of delayed flights, noisy neighbors and missed appointments. 

Electronic Books

I have been using computers since 1982. Back then they were pure calculators with the purpose to crunch numbers. Today anybody can use computers for anything. But for me nothing fundamentally changed. Just that I do a bit more office work myself than before. Also "online service" requires attention now. For example I serve my bank clerk online by doing his job to type numbers into his system. But that's fine. The poor chap has a really dull job. So, why shouldn't I help him a bit? Then he can use the time he saved to read the Financial Times. He really needs it. I also do "online service" to support airlines and rental car companies. I see it like charity work. But all together I don't spend more than half an hour a day in front of a computer screen.

A real change to me has been made not by the Personal Computer, but by the introduction of really good electronic book readers. When I was working in the High Tech Practice of The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) in the late 90s, I was first introduced to "electronic ink" which is a display that uses charged pigments to create a paper like, very sharp picture. At this time the company was still an early stage venture, but it developed amazing displays in the last 12 years. They can be read under strong sunlight as well as in the armchair under a lamp. And it only uses power when the pigments change direction, which is when you turn a page. I have tried a few electronic book readers, and found that the Amazon Kindle is the best. It is perfectly integrated into the Amazon store and I have two devices: one as a pocket book and the other to read larger formats. Everything in the Kindle makes life easy and emulates the way you read a book. And the best thing about the kindle is not what it does, but what it does not do: it does not distract the reader by anything "fancy". 

Since about a year I sold and donated most of my paper books and re-bought them in electronic format. As I read a lot of classics, this is quite cheap to build up a decent library. Much cheaper than shipping tens of boxes of paper books around the planet, next time moving house. First I thought that I would miss the touch and feel of paper, when I read on the Kindle instead of a conventional book. But overall I found that I read much more and much faster on the Kindle. Try it and you will soon forget about the touch and feel of paper.