The Frog [Hardcover]

John Hawkes (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 1996

Asleep by a lily pond just before World War I, a young French child swallows a frog that not only survives within him but becomes a companion for life, sharing his physical and psychological pain but also giving him a strange sort of power over others. 15,000 first printing.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

An elusive novel about a French boy with a frog in his belly. It belongs in the tradition of modern elliptical parables honed to perfection by Kafka as well as in the tradition of "magical realists" such as Laura Esquivel (Like Water for Chocolate). We are never sure if the frog is real or imagined (just as we are never certain if Gregor Samsa really has turned into a giant cockroach), or what, if anything, the frog--or the boy's experiences--might symbolize. Hawkes revels in maintaining this tension of the suspension of suspension of disbelief, and for those of us who love ambiguity, The Frog is an exotic and well-presented literary treat.

From Publishers Weekly

Narrated by a French child, Pascal Gateau, whose mother calls him her "little tadpole" and who himself swallows a frog in the early years of the century, Hawkes's (Adventures in the Alaskan Skin Trade; Sweet William) latest novel is a rather awkwardly told picaresque fairy tale for adults. The frog, whom Pascal names Armand after a fairy-tale amphibian whose story his mother reads to him, takes up residence inside the child's body, becoming his lifelong companion. Pascal's parents work for a rich count, his father as a farmhand and his mother as a cook, until the outbreak of WW I, at which point both farmer and aristocrat go off to battle. Pascal's father returns minus a leg and, clinically depressed, is sent to a mental institution. Eventually, Pascal is consigned there too, and he discovers his abilities as a chef. After the madhouse, he takes a job at a brothel, where Armand begins to make regular appearances of a sexual nature from Pascal's mouth. Hawkes, who has shown himself in previous fictions to be a fantastic stylist of darkly surreal tales that can be as charming as they are disturbing, trips at nearly every step here: Pascal's narrative voice is affected and wearying; his brief tale skims only the surface of every major event and character that crosses its path. Despite the novel's air of allegory, it lacks the thematic depth to carry its conceit. It has its charming moments but, surprisingly, not the sustained wit and invention that usually lifts Hawkes's writing out of the realm of affectation.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: Viking Adult; First Edition edition (June 1, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 067086577X
• ISBN-13: 978-0670865772
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,881,493 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Guilty Pleasure, August 9, 2009

By 

Gregory Blecha (Jupiter, FL) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Frog (Paperback)

ohn Hawkes' "The Frog" is a sensual, indulgent tale about a boy named Pascal who swallows a frog while sleeping beside a pond. The frog's presence induces severe stomach pains, but when Pascal's mother tries to remedy her son's suffering with curatives from the local pharmacist, Pascal determines that he must protect the frog buried in his belly, and thus prevent his mother from seeing what an oddity he has become. From that point, Pascal's psyche becomes fused with Armand, the frog that lives inside him.

Throughout his insular life, Armand chooses when he will emerge from Pascal's throat - once, for example, when wooed by a young girl who is more enchanted by Armand the frog than by Pascal the boy. While Pascal freely operates as an agent of his own passions and desires, other times he is nothing more than the motor while Armand steers him, a host overtaken by its parasite.

Pascal seldom leaves the cloistered walls of his various homes - the pastoral grounds of the Domaine Ardente, Saint-Mamès, an asylum for the afflicted, and the brothel of Madame Fromage where Pascal serves as a sort of concierge. His life is paranthetical, almost a footnote. At the end the reader is left to wonder how to weave and assimilate Pascal's enigmatic fable into his own. Perhaps there is a larger meaning to this story, or perhaps it is simply a guilty pleasure, a richly-worded, evocative and pleasurable narrative to fill a rainy afternoon...

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Writing so good, it's a shame the book is not., June 17, 2001

By 

A Customer - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Frog (Paperback)

The highly elevated and flamboyant style of the unreliable first-person narrator is so scathingly hilarious that I began smiling as I read the first page and did not stop smiling until I had finished the last. For example, here Mr. Hawkes has his eccentric narrator describe a childhood playmate:

"He was as small as an insect, as weak as a spider, a tiny ageless boy who sniveled incessantly and wore large round opaque spectacles. And fear? Why, he was afraid of his own shadow, as the saying goes, and with reason, for Christophe's shadow was a ghastly thing to see, with legs and arms half the thickness of Christophe's actual limbs, which were thin enough, and spindly, black, the poor arms often held outstretched from that wisp of a shadow-body never at rest, and from the ends of which there dangled elongated hands ending not in tiny fingers but in claws, or so it seemed as those brittle uncontrollable hands flapped about to the unheard music of his persecution."

That Hawkes' narrator would choose to describe his boyhood friend with such unabashed derisive mocking (albeit not without a touch of sympathy) is but one of many ways in which he charms us thoroughly even as he behaves monstrously. This playful ambiguity has all the potential in the world to make for a fine and complex novel, but that potential is never fulfilled. The unreality of the fairy tale foundation of the story innately prevents any profundity, and when the story attempts to transcend that foundation and enter our world's reality, the result is absurd: hilarious but not profound or otherwise moving. The writing is a joy to read but the story it tells does not communicate much of a tangible experience, especially given its abrupt ending. I was so taken by the narrator's audacity that I found myself wishing that his story amounted to more it did.

3 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Irritatingly disappointing, October 16, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: The Frog (Paperback)

"The Frog"'s main character sees the whole world as spinning around him, talks philosophic non-sense since he is only 2 year old and uses everybody around himself in a way that makes himself totally unsympathetic. This book made me wanna put it down after 20 pages. The more I went on and the more I hated it. At the end I could have burnt it. Being able to make a nicely articulated display of the English language doesn't necessarily mean to be a good writer. The story has no plot whatsoever and we only see this stupid boy growing older while the frog he carries in his stomach keeps on being his sexual alter-ego. By the way the story is presented, it is supposed to be a fairy tale, but in this it is totally unsuccessful and it ends up being neither this nor an adult look at the sexual awakening of a young French boy. Don't read it.