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The Liar s Dictionary, by Eley Williams Image: Doubleday
Have you ever caught a Mountweazel? Before reading Eley Williams s beguiling first novel, I d never heard of them. But Williams is an expert. She wrote her doctoral dissertation on them, and then she put her hard-earned knowledge to further good use in
The Liar s Dictionary, which is to word lovers what potato chips are to my husband minus the guilt.
What are these sly creatures? Mountweazels are fake entries deliberately inserted into dictionaries, encyclopedias, or other trustworthy reference works as traps to catch plagiarists and copyright infringements. As their name suggests, they are evasive and weaselly, distantly related to intentionally ambiguous or misleading weasel words. According to Wikipedia (which may well be filled with its fair share of Mountweazels), the term was coined by
Swansby’s
New Encyclopaedic Dictionary is the case file, and mountweazels (made-up dictionary entries) are the crimes against vocabulary. The perpetrator of said crimes and the sleuth sniffing them out are separated by a century but bound together by their mutual employer, London’s Swansby House. And the potential victims? Well, that’s where reading the book and learning a plethora of pleasurable words, genuine and fake come in.
Williams speaks with BookPage as she walks her dog near her London home, where she lives with her wife, writer Nell Stevens. Williams explains that the inspiration for the novel came from acts of literary subterfuge that were born both of her studies her Ph.D. research and thesis were about mountweazels and the ways in which her own perspective on dictionaries and other arbiters of language has changed over time.