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Ratings: ★★★★☆ (4.3/5)
Genre: Fiction / Literary Fiction / Historical Fiction / Contemporary Fiction

Book Review:

Peter Carey's ''The Chemistry of Tears'' is a masterful and deeply moving novel that confirms his place among the greatest living writers in the English language. As Andrew Motion, former Chair of the Man Booker Prize, puts it, reading Carey is like ''being alive at the time Dickens was writing.'' This novel is a perfect example of why.

The book is a remarkable feat of storytelling, weaving together two narratives separated by 150 years. In the present, we meet Catherine Gehrig, a senior conservator at the Swinburne Museum in London, who is shattered by the sudden death of her long-time secret lover. Her grief is raw, visceral, and all-consuming. In an attempt to distract her, her employers assign her a mysterious project: to reconstruct a strange, intricate mechanical swan that has been sitting in storage for decades.

The second narrative takes us back to 1854, to the Black Forest of Germany. There, we meet Henry Brandling, an Englishman who has commissioned a local clockmaker to build an extraordinary automaton—a mechanical swan that can swim, flap its wings, and even eat and defecate—in a desperate attempt to distract his dying son.

Carey masterfully interweaves these two stories, drawing parallels between Catherine's grief and Henry's desperation, between the mechanical swan and the mysteries of the human heart. The novel explores profound questions about love, loss, the nature of consciousness, and the relationship between the mechanical and the organic. Can a machine have a soul? Can grief be ''repaired'' like a broken object?

Carey's prose is, as always, luminous and precise. He has a gift for creating vivid, unforgettable characters and for making the reader feel the weight of their emotions. The novel is both intellectually stimulating and deeply affecting.

''The Chemistry of Tears'' is a must-read for fans of literary fiction, for anyone who appreciates masterful storytelling, and for anyone who has ever experienced the pain of loss and wondered how to go on. It is a beautiful, haunting, and ultimately hopeful book. Highly recommended.