THE GRASSHOPPER KING

Name: THE GRASSHOPPER KING
Author: Jordan Ellenberg
ISBN: 1-56689-139-6

by Jordan Ellenberg ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 2003

Nicely done and genuinely funny though overlong: a satire that would benefit from Polonius’s famous dictum: “Brevity is the...

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Slate.com journalist Ellenberg, a well-known Princeton mathematician, debuts with this tale of a deranged scholar out west who devotes his life to the study of the worst poet in history.

We’re introduced to the woebegone campus of Chandler State University, founded in 1871 on the site of the gold mine where prospector Tip Chandler struck it rich. The mine played out decades ago, but the college remains: an island of intellectual mediocrity in a ghost town in the middle of the desert. Chandler is famous for only one thing: its world-renowned Department of Gravinics, dedicated to the study of a Monaco-sized country in the Carpathian Mountains that was swallowed up in the 1920s by the Soviet Union. Gravine’s most famous poet was an English expatriate named Henderson, and the world’s foremost Henderson scholar is Chandler’s own Stanley Higgs, a Chandler alum who discovered a stash of Henderson’s poetry in Berlin and returned to Chandler to codify the manuscripts. The fact that Henderson’s poetry is considered unreadable by just about everyone makes his discovery only more of an event, and soon Higgs has become a star in his own right, attracting students from both coasts and abroad. But, like many an academic superstar, Higgs has his personality quirks, the most notable being his refusal to speak. At first he’s merely taciturn, but eventually he gives up on talking altogether—with disastrous results for his lectures, of course, and for the university, which is desperate to regain the services of its most prized teacher. A surveillance squad is assigned to monitor Higgs around the clock for signs of vocal return. Meanwhile, Higgs’s dogged research into the whereabouts of Henderson (who may still be alive) begins to bear fruit. Will Henderson himself speak again before Higgs does? And, more to the point, will either one have anything worthwhile to say?

Nicely done and genuinely funny though overlong: a satire that would benefit from Polonius’s famous dictum: “Brevity is the soul of wit.”

Pub Date: April 1, 2003

ISBN: 1-56689-139-6

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Coffee House

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
SHAPE
by Jordan Ellenberg

- BOOK REVIEW
HOW NOT TO BE WRONG
by Jordan Ellenberg

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THE RECOGNITIONS

by William Gaddis ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 1955

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This overlong (946 pages) and rather pretentious first novel concerns itself with the impasse of the modern intellectual, living in a world where everyone wears a false face of one kind or another, wanting to believe in something, and "knowing" too much to have faith in anything. The scene is Spain, Rome and Paris in Europe, New York City (mainly Greenwich Village) and a New England town in the United States, and at moments an unnamed Central American Republic. The characters, and they multiply- since Mr. Gaddis has tried to write a "novel without a hero", range from hipsters and homosexuals to spoiled Catholics and Puritans to aimless pseudo-intellectuals, town drunkards, and religious fanatics. In what is also a novel without a defined plot, the most interesting parts concern Wyatt Gwyon, as his various activities take him from forging old masters in New York to Spain where he attempts to find some kind of truth; and his father, a New England minister who converts himself to Mithraism- sun worship. But the main fault of the novel is a complete lack of discipline. Gaddis writes with ease and vigor about a Greenwich Village gathering, but repeats this sequence many times. He knows many odd facts about ancient religious and he injects them all. He is familiar with many languages, and there are passages in Spanish, Italian, French, German, Latin and even Hungarian. It is a pity that, in his first novel, he did not have stronger editorial guidance than is apparent in the book for he can write very well- even though most of the time he just lets his pen run on.

Pub Date: March 10, 1955

ISBN: 1564786919

Page Count: 976

Publisher: Harcourt, Brace

Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1955

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE RUSH FOR SECOND PLACE
by William Gaddis

- BOOK REVIEW
A FROLIC OF HIS OWN
by William Gaddis

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THE BURIED GIANT

by Kazuo Ishiguro ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 3, 2015

Lovely: a fairy tale for grown-ups, both partaking in and departing from a rich literary tradition.

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A lyrical, allusive (and elusive) voyage into the mists of British folklore by renowned novelist Ishiguro (Never Let Me Go, 2005, etc.).

There be giants buried beneath the earth—and also the ancient kings of Britain, Arthur among them. Ishiguro’s tale opens not on such a declaration but instead on a hushed tone; an old man has been remembering days gone by, and the images he conjures, punctuated by visions of a woman with flowing red hair, may be truthful or a troubling dream. Axl dare not ask his neighbors, fellow residents of a hillside and bogside burrow, for help remembering, “[f]or in this community, the past was rarely discussed.” With his wife, who bears the suggestive if un-Arthurian name Beatrice, the old man sets off on a quest in search of the past and of people forgotten. As it unfolds, Axl finds himself in the company of such stalwarts as a warrior named Wistan, who is himself given to saying such things as “[t]he trees and moorland here, the sky itself seem to tug at some lost memory,” and eventually Sir Gawain himself. The premise of a nation made up of amnesiac people longing for meaning is beguiling, and while it opens itself to heavy-handed treatment, Ishiguro is a master of subtlety; as with Never Let Me Go, he allows a detail to slip out here, another there, until we are finally aware of the facts of the matter, horrible though they may be. By the time the she-dragon named Querig enters the picture, the reader will already well know that we’re in Tolkien-ish territory—but Tolkien by way of P.D. James, with deep studies in character and allegory layered onto the narrative. And heaps of poetry, too, even as forgetfulness resolves as a species of PTSD: “I was but a young knight then….Did you not all grow old in a time of peace? So leave us to go our way without insults at our back.”

Lovely: a fairy tale for grown-ups, both partaking in and departing from a rich literary tradition.