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Sep 03, 2011

Andrew rated it:

A very pleasant read. I did wonder, as I read the blurbs and made a mental list of the "influences" on this story, whether there is a fad for this sort of existential detective story at the moment. Alternatively, maybe there's just a classic form that never goes in or out of style, and listing its hallmarks would be redundant. I'll do it anyhow. The fashion of the 1880's-1930's, the weather of southeastern England, the weapons instantly familiar to players of Clue, Kafka/Borges/Aus More...

1 comment like (8 people liked it)

Mar 06, 2009

Nathan rated it:

As I was reading this smart, tricky, and thoroughly beguiling detective story, I kept thinking of Paul Auster’s CITY OF GLASS. Like Auster’s main character, Quinn, Charles Unwin is a reluctant hero, a more-or-less ordinary guy who finds himself the detective on a strange case that he never wanted in the first place. For the last 20 years, Unwin has been an agency clerk to star detective Travis Sivart. One morning Unwin arrives at work to find Sivart gone and himself to be promoted to detectiv More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Mar 13, 2009

Chris rated it:

Full disclosure: I've never written a review of a book by someone I know (hi Jeb!)

I hate reading reviews of analogy ("If Voxtrot teamed up with Paul Simon, they'd have formed Vampire Weekend!") but have a weakness for writing them. So if I was asked to write a short blurb for the back of the paper-back edition, I might say that if Kafka wrote the movie Chinatown, replacing J.J. Gittes with Sam Lowrie from "Brazil," it might read like "The Manual of Detection More...

4 comments like (3 people liked it)

Jan 30, 2009

Gavin rated it:

Excellent.

1 comment like (4 people liked it)

Aug 08, 2011

Adam rated it:

Jedediah Berry uses the stock images of the detective novel to create a Kafkaesque fable. Set in a quasi-victorian(where the steampunk label comes from)/quasi-30’s atmosphere this is an atmospheric, baroque, and endlessly readable fantasy where it could have been a dry run through of genre cleverness. The sum of the parts doesn’t quite bring it in for a totally satisfying ending but the ride is terrific. Great debut. On influences, well digested for the most part,though maybe a bit of an obvi More...

1 comment like (4 people liked it)

Nov 01, 2011

Abby rated it:

I loved this book for about the first third, was on board for about half but finished it in a fog, still admiring Jedidiah Berry's skill but not at all sure I cared or even understood what was going on. [return][return]Among the book's delights is the description of the world of Charles Unwin, a clerk in a huge, rigidly bureaucratic agency who takes pride in his meticulous documentation of the cases solved by the renowned detective, Sivart. Unwin takes comfort in the routine, attaching his um More...

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Aug 02, 2011

Candace added it

film noir. gothic fantasy. the thursday next series, the thin man movies, spenser and hawk. if you like any of these, you will likely enjoy this book as much as i did. it is splendidly and almost seamlessly written. the prose is intense and carries a depth that i don't find often in any but the most tragic of fictions--and this is no tragedy. it's not a comedy, it's definitely not a romance, but really just a good story with some decidedly whacked out elements. charles unwin, hapless clerk to th More...

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Mar 04, 2011

Deb rated it:

This inventive mystery takes the old fashioned private eye story and recreates it with elements of fantasy. At the center is Charles Unwin, a clerk for 'the agency' who suddenly finds himself promoted to a detective. The detective that he once clerked for has gone missing and as Unwin encounters a series of bizarre occurances he becomes determined to track down the missing detective--for he may be the only one who can explain what's going one and help solve the case. [return]I sometimes had a More...

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Mar 16, 2009

Tony rated it:

Berry, Jedediah. THE MANUAL OF DETECTION. (2009). **. If you crossed some of the recessive genes of Lewis Carroll with those of Philip K. Dick, you might come up with a novelist who would write a book like this. It is set in a nameless city where it is always seems to be raining. In fact, the hero’s umbrella plays a major role in the story. The hero, Charles Unwin, works as a clerk for a detective agency. The agency is populated with lots of people who have specialized jobs, and noone ca More...

0 comments like (6 people liked it)

Sep 10, 2011

Blake rated it:

The Manual of Detection reads like the bastard love-child of Dashiell Hammett and Terry Gilliam. First time novelist Jedediah Berry stirs all the tropes of a hard-boiled detective story with surrealistic fantasy elements to create a delightfully eccentric concoction that goes down easy despite the serious message at its core.

Anyone familiar with the famous quote attributed to Benjamin Franklin,"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, dese More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Aug 30, 2011

Joe rated it:

I feel awful, I haven't written a professional review of this book for some high class magazine

like Cosmopolitan or Vogue or whatever. (I started one, but not smart enough to finish.)

It's amazing ! One of the best books ever, lately, honestly.

(And I know the guy. I went to Poetry School with him.

I sat in a workshop, work-shopping some chapters.

Remember I had one or two suggestions that: a. didn't matter, b. he already thought about and re More...

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Aug 28, 2011

Authorsanon rated it:

A nameless city , a vanished travelling circus, elephants and a detective with wet socks; a maverick of a book.
Mr Charles Unwin, a clerk working at The Agency of Detection, is catapulted one morning to the elevated position of detective – one of the top operatives of the Agency, Sivart, is missing and it is up to Unwin to trace his whereabouts. He has no sooner started when another detective, Lamech is found dead at his own desk; Unwin is quickly framed for his murder, and so under pressur More...

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Apr 01, 2010

John rated it:

In an unnamed city which has certain resemblances to early-20th-century New York, many matters are regulated by the Agency, a large, somewhat Kafkaesque organization whose hierarchy runs, in descending order: Watchers, Detectives, Clerks, Under-Clerks. There's not much direct communication between the members of these four strata.

Charles Unwin is the clerk whose responsibility it is to formalize, index and file the case reports of Detective Travis Sivart, the city's More...

0 comments like (4 people liked it)

Mar 07, 2010

Deborah rated it:

I went to Booksmith on Haight Street to get my dad a birthday gift. I was drawn to this book and immediately decided to get it for him, and to borrow it after he read it. The author's name sounded familiar, but I saw that it was his first novel, so I kind of shrugged and forgot about it. A few months later, the Bard e-news letter came and in it was an announcement that Jedediah Berry, class of '99, would be giving a reading on campus from his first novel, The Manual of Detection. All of a su More...

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

Dec 30, 2009

Mark rated it:

My Kindle suggested I'd like this and it was right.

This is a delicious story of Mr. Charles Unwin, a "clerk" in "The Agency" for twenty years who has had the privilege of writing up some of the cases of the Agency's most famous detective with the palindromic name of Travis Sivart. "The Oldest Murdered Man" and "The Three Deaths of Captain Baker" and "The Man Who Stole November Twelfth" are his crowning achievements.

But whe More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Nov 08, 2009

David rated it:

I wouldn’t normally dwell on the book-as-object, but I have to say that The Manual of Detection is one of the most attractive volumes that I’ve seen in quite some time. You can’t see from the picture, but it has a laminate cover (i.e. the image is printed directly on to the cover, with no dust-jacket); and the whole package gives the impression of a book that has been designed with great care and attention. Furthermore, it has been made to resemble the fictional Manual of Detection described in More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Sep 19, 2011

Tonya rated it:

Charles Unwin is a Clerk, that is the sum total of who he is. He is mostly happy with this except that he is the Clerk to the most successful Detective in The Agency and the villians just aren't as interesting as they used to be. Now there's been an error made and Unwin's detective is missing, presumed dead, and Unwin has been promoted from Clerk to Detective. There's nothing for Unwin to do but correct this error and take his righful place back on the 14th floor with the other Clerks.

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Mar 23, 2011

Catie rated it:

I’ve had this on my bookshelf for quite a while. It’s easily the most visually striking book that I own, but still I managed to avoid picking it up. This is one that’s hard to classify – or maybe I just don’t have much experience with the “genre.” It’s part surrealist dream caper, part hardboiled detective novel, with a dash of witty humor and some commentary on extremism just for good measure. So yeah, this book has a lot going on, but it all somehow fits together with total precision.
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0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Sep 13, 2010

Benjamin added it

I want to be clear that I’m not making fun of people who do this, but almost every Goodreads review I’ve read of this book contains some description-by-simile: it's like Kafka; it's like Kafka and Auster collaborating; it's like Kafka's lovechild with Chesterton, writing his own bedtime story; it's like Kafka and Chesterton ejaculated into the skull of Lewis Carroll and made Lethem (early-mid Lethem) drink it; it's like Kafka possessed Neil Gaiman who then wrote the story with a typewriter of ca More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jun 17, 2010

Sharakael rated it:

This was a very interesting read. Most of it started out as a standard PI novel; a reluctant detective, a case that seemed impossible to solve (to the main character) but which he'd need to solve if he wanted everything to go back to normal, and an ongoing feeling that everyone else but the main character knew what was going on. 1/3 to the end of the novel, things started to shift, and suddenly it entered the unusual area where people could and would walk around in dreams doing their investigati More...

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Apr 09, 2010

Sistermagpie rated it:

Um, wow. What a book unlike any other. It definitely lived up to the recommendation I first read for it, which pointed out that in the Internet/cell phone age, a lot of the things that made up a certain kind of detective fiction fell away. You no longer really had the lone detective meeting up with mysterious people.

MoD is one of those worlds that blends fantasy and reality in surprising ways. The caper being solved has details that are almost whimsical, but they're always grounded More...

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Feb 23, 2010

Kerfe rated it:

How could I resist any book with a large eye in the center of both front and back covers?

Something's rotten in Denmark--or in the Agency as clerk Unwin discovers, as he reluctantly assumes the role of Detective. Closed cases are becoming unsolved and open into corpses, lost and found, alive again, or newly dead. Sleepers are both awake and dreaming. Unreliable witnesses and mysterious adventures provide clues, real and false. Identities are fluid. Where will it end? When did it More...

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Jul 01, 2009

Gabriel rated it:

Kafka's post-hoc adoption by the Existentialists is a real mystery, because his fiction is not simply an exemplar of mauvaise foi, as the anthologies would have it, but a parody of it, and a parody of its parody. Kafka acknowledges that the waiter acts his part, and that he has no choice but to act his part, but also that he does not choose to act his part, even as he chooses to "be" a waiter, and cannot choose anyhow. The social sciences have, unwittingly, been playing the devil's adv More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jun 14, 2009

Peter rated it:

I had a bit of trouble getting into the Manual of Detection. I felt like I was in a Magritte painting where things are strange and precise, and but cold and lifeless. The main character barely shows any humanity until 3 or 4 chapters in when he waves to some school children. The murder of a colleague discovered earlier creates only a bout of self-absorption.

Around page 96, however, the book picked up for me so that I had trouble putting it down. The protagonist develops and his char More...

1 comment like (2 people liked it)

Sep 22, 2010

Mason rated it:

This book was quite a lot of fun. It took only about the first 15 pages or so to hook me in, since I'm a sucker for surrealist mysteries. Charles Unwin, a clerk at the Agency, is suddenly and mysteriously promoted to be a detective, which is unheard of. Convinced it's a mistake, his first case is to discover what happened to his detective whom he's replacing. Meanwhile, we're introduced to his detective's enemies, including the dream-walking Enoch Hoffman and his cronies at the Travels-No-More c More...

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Sep 23, 2011

Nancy rated it:

Charles Unwin works as a clerk in a large detective agency. One day, he finds himself promoted to the level of detective, only Unwin was pretty happy just being a clerk. As Unwin tries to straighten out his new life, more mysteries pop up. Where is Sivart, the detective that Unwin served as a clerk for? Who is the mysterious woman who has taken over his old job? Why has Sivart's old supervisor been murdered? And what information lies in chapter eighteen of his guidebook, The Manual of Detection? More...

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Jul 18, 2010

KarenC rated it:

This book could easily have been titled The Reluctant Detective. It's title was intriguing, but I wondered how exciting the story might be. Well, it caught me up and I didn't want to leave it. The embossed bookcover with its ever-open eye and "Never sleeping" motto, along with the look of a manual of instruction made me wonder what I was getting into. The old style of the text made me think of Jasper Fforde and his Thursday Next series. I also agree with another reviewer who said "

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Jun 03, 2010

K rated it:

Something about this book (title? concept?) had me questioning adding it to my TBR pile, thinking I’d be bored. It wasn’t long into the precise opening before those thoughts disappeared.

Unwin is an unwitting detective who wakes up to find himself in the middle of a mystery that upends his organized life. He needs to sort it out quickly to get back his job on the fourteenth floor and the reassurance of old cases long solved and archived. The clerk cum detective is a guileless (Jason S More...

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May 18, 2011

Sarah rated it:

The Manual of Detection is a charming and engaging mystery set in an world that is both like and unlike ours. If the movies The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Stranger Than Fiction had a literature lovechild, it would be this book. It follows a man named Charles Unwin who is puzzled to learn one morning that he has been promoted from Clerk to Detective for no apparent reason. What follows is a surreal adventure through the labyrinthine detective headquarters (known as The Agency), the rain-swept ci More...

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Jun 13, 2011

Becca rated it:

Wow. This book was amazing. I didn't know what I was getting into (attempts by other reviewers to pin it down with adjectives like "noir" and "kafka-esque" and "magical realism" don't hit it quite right, in my opinion, though all skirt around the right description). A truly unique and interesting read, unlike almost any other book I've read before. I have no idea how to describe it. Just read it.

0 comments like (1 person liked it)