The Boy with the Cuckoo-Clock Heart

December 7, 2009
Set in late-19th-century Europe, this slim, melancholy, and sometimes thin novel affords considerable escapist pleasures. At 14, Jack, a misfit orphan with a cuckoo-clock installed in his chest, treks across Europe in search of Miss Acacia, “a little singer... who's always bumping into things,” he met four years before. In Paris, he finds a companion in Méliès, a lovesick, quixotic magician, and as their journey unfolds, Malzieu sketches European landscapes and crafts figurative language with irresistible relish: Miss Acacia's laugh, for instance, is “as light as beads tumbling over a xylophone.” After Jack reaches Spain and finds Miss Acacia, he embarks on a tumultuous relationship with his beloved that will alter his life forever. Despite a few too-cutesy sexual metaphors and coming-of-age tropes, the novel's sentimentality only rarely devolves into treacle. Calling to mind a host of cultural touchstones, from Pinocchio to The Wizard of Oz
, this kaleidoscopic picaresque will enchant many adults and young people alike.

December 15, 2009
First the broken heart, then love, in this reverse-sequence fantasy about a medical freak, French musician/novelist Malzieu's first U.S. publication.

On the coldest day on earth, Little Jack is born with a heart frozen solid. His teenage mother disappears for good; Jack owes his survival to resourceful midwife Dr. Madeleine, who attaches a cuckoo clock to his heart to get it beating. This happens in Edinburgh on April 16, 1874. Good-hearted Madeleine raises Jack while attending to her clients, mostly prostitutes. His clock-heart, she warns him repeatedly,"is not robust enough to endure the torment of love." Guess what? The first time they leave the house, ten-year-old Jack is smitten by the sight of a street entertainer, an Andalusian singer as diminutive as himself, and his heart starts whirring dangerously. At school, he learns that Miss Acacia has left town; his informant, a bully named Joe, tells him to back off; Joe has first dibs on the little singer. The boys fight; Joe loses an eye; cops arrive. Jack escapes to Paris, where magician-clockmaker Georges Mli's tells him to forget the clockwork and follow his real heart. It's good advice; but the clockwork keeps intruding in this novel lamentably short on both heart and characterization. Jack tracks down Miss Acacia in Granada and finds his love reciprocated. Here the story disintegrates as Joe reappears and Jack succumbs irrationally to jealousy and self-hatred, trying to rip out his clock. In noted contrast to L. Frank Baum, who fused fantasy and logic in his simple, dignified portrait of another fellow with a heart problem in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Malzieu undermines both as he flails around. Maybe this strained conceit worked as a concept album for the author's rock band, Dionysos (La mcanique du cœur, 2007), or director Luc Besson will do better with the projected animated film version.

"I'm a human gimmick," confesses Jack,"who wishes he could ditch the special effects." The author should have ditched them too.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

March 1, 2010
Lead singer of the French band Dionysos, Malzieu approaches writing more like a film director than an author, as his first novel to be translated into English shows. Malzieu uses vivid metaphors and fantastical inventions to craft a beautifully written tale of love, both maternal and romantic. Saved from death with a grafted clock for a heart, little Jack is warned by his adopted mother never to fall in love lest his fragile clock-heart break. Despite this parental warning, Jack becomes entranced with a young dancer. His emotions stir him to violence, forcing him to flee his home and to embark upon a journey to find the object of his affection. Along the way he meets a range of characters from Jack the Ripper to Georges Melies, the first cinematographic director. VERDICT The prose style is simple and fluid, and the setting is not unlike a Tim Burton filmdreamy, dark, and magicalso it's no surprise that this novel is being adapted into an animated film. For fans of magical realism and fairy tales.Joshua Finnell, Denison Univ. Lib., Granville, OH

Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 1, 2010
Malzieu opens this phantasmagorical novel (which is already the basis of a rather stirring album by his pop group, Dionysos, and is due for yet another transmutation as an animated film) in Edinburgh in 1874, with the birth of the narrator, Jack. Hes ushered into the world with a malfunctioning heart by Dr. Madeleine, a midwife who also specializes in mechanical wizardry, so she fuses a cuckoo-clock to the boys heart to keep it ticking and tocking. As he grows older, she warns him that the delicate gear work of his heart could never withstand the palpitating bliss and leaden turmoil of falling in love, but, of course, he falls helplessly for a frail songstress, and their passionate affair threatens to literally rip his heart from his chest. While theres a definite flavor of The Tin Drum mixed with a heavy dose of Tim Burton, this isnt so much magic realism as it is metaphor realism, which Malzieu milks for all its painfully earnest and overwrought symbolism. For those with a yen for moony French sensualism, though, this book is positively dripping with it.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)