Where louts and umlauts get their due

Oh pity Jon Fasman! The 30-year-old, Ivy League-educated journalist-turned-novelist has written a historically rich debut whodunit structured around a collection of objects displayed under glass. And now he finds himself reviewed by, well, an Ivy League-educated journalist-turned-novelist who, at age 30, published a debut work of historical fiction structured around a collection of objects displayed under glass.

Wait. It gets worse. Fasman has pinned a good chunk of the book’s story -- or rather one of the book’s many stories -- to the very university town the reviewer sees from his window.

Well, before Fasman ducks for cover, we should neutralize his concerns. And his readers’.

Pity is the last thing required.

“The Geographer’s Library” turns out to be a brainy noir procedural served up with a side of Bacon, Paracelsus and (take a deep breath) Yussef Hadras ibn Azzam Abd Salih Jafar Khalid Idris, the 11th century polymath whose life and works have inspired the title, structure and lyrical chapter headings of this hugely entertaining Baghdad bazaar of a book.

Perhaps the esteemed reader wishes to behold the ark for the Holiest of the Holies? No problem, step inside. Youth potion? But of course, right this way. An Ethiopian alchemist? Schrodinger’s cat? You’ll find them farther on, beyond the smooth-skinned corpse. Or maybe the reader is desiring to observe a most rare 12th century chess piece -- a castle with a crossed destiny worthy of Italo Calvino? Enter and behold. And please to consider Emerald Tablets purporting to contain a foundational text of medieval alchemy. You like byways? This book has byways. And labyrinths, mazes, hidden alcoves and recessed locks. Interested in magic flutes? “The Geographer’s Library” has two -- one in gold, the other a silver model known as the “Sliding Facilitator of Madness.”

With so many riches to admire, it’s probably best to dispatch plot matters as quickly as possible. Much of the book is narrated by Paul Tomm, an endearing, ungainly college grad of the young fogy variety, the self-described mongrel progeny of a Dutch-Irish mother and a Greek-Jewish father. Tomm lands a job at the Lincoln Carrier, an understaffed weekly serving a sleepy Connecticut town. Work promises little in the way of intrigue until the paper’s gruff chain-smoking editor assigns Tomm an obit. Jaan Puhapaev, an enigmatic professor of Baltic history, has died of unknown causes.

“Nothing fancy,” the editor speculates. “No Woodstein stuff.”

Yeah, right.

Legwork requires Tomm to revisit his alma mater, where the deceased taught the kind of mind-numbing, two-semester survey familiar to all history majors. Tomm interviews a couple of Puhapaev’s colorful colleagues, most notably a classically trained bon vivant emigre named Avram Jadid. (Think George Steiner channeling Wolfgang Puck.) The courtly professor provides a few leads and a useful introduction to his nephew Joe, a lock-picking, foul-mouthed detective with time to kill.

With help from the Jadids, Tomm begins to uncover some of Puhapaev’s extramural pursuits -- pursuits that involve handguns and a variety of felonious acts necessitating the intervention of Vernum Sickle, a top-tier criminal defense lawyer. The pace of the inquiry (and Tomm’s libido) quickens with the arrival of the dead man’s neighbor Hannah Rowe, a music teacher whose face falls “on the perfect side of plain, one that grew deeper the more you looked at it.” Needless to say, Tomm looks at that face plenty. The story kicks into overdrive when the county coroner investigating Puhapaev’s death is himself killed, the victim of a hit-and-run.

Warning signs quickly pile up. There are threats from Albanian Eddie (an unsavory barkeep whose nationality, like that of so many characters in the book, is open to speculation). A human eyetooth, roots still attached, is soon nailed to Tomm’s apartment door.

These warning signs, alas, are ignored. Further assistance from the Jadids leads Tomm to Puhapaev’s office and home. And what does Tomm discover? I’ll let Fasman take that question: “ ... the whisper of a shadow of a rumor of a relic.” To divulge more would do a disservice to this winningly cryptic tale. Besides, Tomm’s account, as noted earlier, is but one strand of this globetrotting time traveler’s mystery. Fasman crosscuts the New England procedural with several nefarious narratives tied to the objects motivating Puhapaev’s after-hours endeavors.

Granted, this interpolative tactic is risky. It demands a small dose of patience. But that patience is amply rewarded as Fasman’s reliquary of oddities deepens the reader’s interest, devotion and contemplative delight.

Take item No. 6, an ivory box, dating to the 9th or 10th century. The object has a stunning provenance enriched by itsextraordinary cargo. We learn of the contents from Pavel Zhensky, the commandant of Yamal, a Soviet prison camp in a region so cold that human breath can freeze into droplets that fall on the ground. Local nomads, Zhensky explains, call the frigid period that produces this effect “the whispering of stars”:

“The Yakuts say you should never tell secrets outside during the whispering of the stars, because the words themselves freeze, and in the spring thaw anyone who walks past that spot will be able to hear them. In springtime the air fills with outdated gossip, unheeded commands, the voices of children who have become adolescents, and snatches of forgotten conversation.”

With that, Zhensky produces the box in question and preserves the crystalline recitation of an exiled Estonian poet. Talk about breathtaking. The image, and the sinister details that follow, generate a hauntingly incantatory image worthy of Milan Kundera when Kundera had game.

Yamal is hardly the only exotic setting. Oh, the places you’ll go in this tour du monde tour de force. (It ain’t called “The Geographer’s Library” for nothing.) Consider the pit stops on Page 15: Cordoba, Baghdad, Bukhara, Mikkouni, the Khamantor Mountains of the Khazars, the cities of Yazd, Eshahan, Ahvaz, Dimashq, Beirut and Jerusalem, the islands of Sicily, Malta and Minorca.

And if the objects and places sound wild, get a load of the characters. There’s Valvukas the Lietuvan warlord, Ibragim Ikhmayev the Ingushetian inmate, Milos Smilos the comic-book scholar, a dismembered don named Darius Dimbledon and a yurt-dwelling Yakut named Nei. Oh, also Col. Virju Saarju, Cosmas Indicopleustes, Lavrenty Mashenabili and (my absolute favorite) Abulfaz Akhundov, the “human palimpsest” whose aliases include, but are by no means limited to, Fyodor, Paul, Sudat, Jean-Pierre, Jose and Shmuel.

Consider this delicious moment of dissimulation: “Abulfaz Akhundov -- whose ability to flatten and lengthen his short vowels, round out his r’s, and keep his v’s and w’s separate in mind, use, and mouth, had earned him the temporary name of Chester “Chet” Muncie -- tied his Kmart blue-and-red rep tie first in a four-in-hand and then in a Windsor before finally settling, as he knew he must, on a clumsily tied half-Windsor deliberately shoved three centimeters down and to the left from his top collar button. Since arriving, he had seen no man wearing any other type of knot.”

Akhundov’s Midwestern makeover, complete with “Welps,” is just one example of Fasman’s ventriloquism. Dialectologists will also enjoy some “rilly, rilly” perky lockjaw patter from an East Coast career counselor, some staccato pidgin spoken by He-li Yaofan during a culinary confession (“Not fresh. Make from powder.”) and playfully ambiguous pronoun usage in the English spoken by Estonians.

Word freaks may wish to know that this is the first place, off the Scrabble board, I’ve seen a practical use for an oudist or waterzooi. If such verbal legerdemain causes alarm, relax. Fasman wears his learning lightly, tempering antiquarian and grammatical lusts with pungent Anglo-Saxon tough talk. Both louts and umlauts are given their due, which should make this book appeal to readers of cop lit and comp lit alike. Are there some missteps? Sure. But they’re entirely minor and only worth mentioning to assert the reviewer’s bona fides. It’s better to ruffle topsails, instead of “rustle” them, and poison-tipped spears may be marginally more practical for the careerist than the “spurs” that appear in the text.

Alchemy, Fasman tells us more than once, is the science of transformation. Good fiction aspires to the same lofty goal, and it is achieved in “The Geographer’s Library,” a cabinet of wonders written by a novelist whose surname and sensibility fit comfortably on the shelf between Umberto Eco and John Fowles. *