The Frog

Front Cover
Viking, 1996 - Fiction - 191 pages
John Hawkes's amazing new tale opens as a French child, asleep beside a lily pond shortly before the First World War, swallows a frog. Mysteriously, the creature survives within him - a companion throughout a life filled with physical and psychological pain but also with a strange, frog-given, exhilarating power over others. An Aesopian fable? An ironic children's story? The Frog goes far beyond these, as the adventures of Pascal, the misanthropic victim, and Armand, the tyrannical frog, move between a chateau, a mental institution, and a brothel. Soon The Frog becomes a mock philosophical treatise on the culinary arts, the limits of belief, the sinister appeal of illness, and - as the frog usurps even Pascal's sexuality - eroticism. This brilliantly styled parable of violence and illusion explores with aching poignancy the very qualities that make us human.

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Contents

Section 1
1
Section 2
3
Section 3
99
Copyright

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About the author (1996)

Author John Hawkes was born in Stamford, Connecticut on August 17, 1925. During World War II, he joined the American Field Service and was an ambulance driver in Italy and Germany from the summer of 1944 to the summer of 1945. He taught at Brown University for thirty years. He wrote eighteen novels, four plays, and a volume of poetry during his lifetime. His first novel, The Cannibal, was published in 1949. His other works include The Lime Twig, The Beetle Leg, and Virginie: Her Two Lives. His novel Adventures in the Alaskan Skin Trade won France's Prix Medicis Étranger in 1986. He died on May 15, 1998.

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