ENGL 668k: Digital Studies (Spring 2004)

'Codex': A Bibliophilic Thriller

Haven't read it myself yet -- just read the review on Sunday, March 21, but you can see why the title caught my eye! (Anyone familiar with author Lev Grossman?)

In her review in the New York Times Sunday Book Section, POLLY SHULMAN writes, "Is the ''Viage'' a manuscript? Is it an incunable -- a book made in the first 50 years of printing? Is it nothing more than an 18th-century rewriting of a genuine 14th-century source text, done up in fake, ye-olde language -- ''like a novelization of a movie based on a novel,'' as Margaret, the sexy grad student, puts it? Is it a literary forgery like the similarly named ''Culex,'' which claimed to be Virgil's juvenilia, or the similarly themed ''Travels of Sir John Mandeville''? Could it be what bibliographers call a ghost -- a book that has been documented but never actually existed?

If ''Codex'' can trace its parentage on one side to self-referential writers like Laurence Sterne or Borges, on the other side it's descended from the computer game Tomb Raider and its movie versions, the Lara Croft series. (In fact, I kept imagining Angelina Jolie as Margaret.) A second line of narrative runs parallel to the book hunt, heading off to meet it in the distance like a pair of railroad tracks, and taking us into territory well mapped by members of the cyberpunk school of science fiction, such as Neal Stephenson and William Gibson.

To read the entire review, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/21/books/review/21SHULMT.html
(If you're not already registered with the online Times, you will have to register first -- it's easy and free.)