Francine-Machine

Jonathan Rée

  • Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen by Barbara Maria Stafford and Frances Terpak
    Getty Research Institute, 416 pp, £30.00, February 2002, ISBN 0 89236 590 0
  • The Secret Life of Puppets by Victoria Nelson
    Harvard, 350 pp, £20.50, February 2002, ISBN 0 674 00630 5
  • Living Dolls: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life by Gaby Wood
    Faber, 278 pp, £12.99, March 2002, ISBN 0 571 17879 0

Descartes’s Meditations tells the story of six days in the life of a rather self-important, busy young man who has granted himself a short sabbatical. Quite a few years have passed, he says, since he decided to take this meditative mini-break, and now at last he has cleared a whole week to spend in an isolated house with only his thoughts and memories for company. He is planning to retrace the steps of his intellectual development since childhood, and then start rebuilding his mental world from scratch. A fire is burning quietly in the stove, pen and paper lie within easy reach, and beeswax candles are giving out their soft glow.

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[*] Wood’s inquiries are extended and rounded out in Tom Standage’s delightful The Mechanical Turk: The True Story of the Chess-Playing Machine that Fooled the World (Allen Lane, 288 pp., £12.99, 25 April, 0 713 99525 4).