The Man Who Grew Young [Paperback]

Daniel Quinn (Author), Tim Eldred (Illustrator)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 15, 2001

Daniel Quinn strikes again with this full-color, illustrated novel. What’s going to happen when the universe comes to the end of its string? Like a cosmic yo-yo, it’s going to start traveling back UP the string, to its beginning—and every life that has ever been lived will be lived again: in reverse. The strangest adventure to be found in this backward-running universe is that of Adam Taylor, whose epic quest through time cannot end until he finds his way into the womb that gave birth to us all.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Quinn's (After Dachau) new graphic novel incorporates his interests in alternative realities and the environment while using an odd and engaging narrative device. The entire social, technological and biological life of the planet, and indeed the universe, is traveling backwards. People are "born" in cemeteries, dug up and transferred to a hospital where they awake into life. In this strange universe, individuals enter life as adults driven by fate to reunite with (and reenter) their mothers, all the while growing younger as they return like salmon to the point of their beginnings. Quinn's book offers an elegant cosmological loop suggesting that at death we just start over again in another realm retracing our existential steps. Mankind methodically abandons technology; incredibly, coal and raw resources are put back into the ground; computers are discarded for typewriters and the great cities are dismantled. But Quinn's protagonist, Adam Taylor, is the odd man out, his mother nowhere to be found. Seemingly immortal, Taylor outlives his peers to witness entire human epochs pass before his eyes in reverse until he reaches the very beginning of civilization and an answer to the riddle of his mother's whereabouts. Quinn's quirky tale is compelling, but its implications are a bit too obvious (as technology recedes, the environment recovers, native peoples recover their lands from whites, etc.), and a little silly (if vegetables go back into the ground, just where, dare we ask, do foodstuffs come from in the first place?). Eldred's color artwork is competent but bland and conventional.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From the Author

THE MAN WHO GREW YOUNG has been in work for many years. It was conceived a decade ago, written first as a prose narrative, then as a screenplay, and finally as a graphic novel, the magnificent art taking several years to prepare. The result is a book that has a special place in my heart, the tale of a great cosmic adventure, mysterious and inspiring.

Someone once told me he didn't want to read ISHMAEL because he "couldn't stand hearing any more bad news." Of course, readers of that book know it's not a bringer of bad news but of enlightenment and hope. Even so, some readers did finish it feeling depressed and hopeless. No one, however, will be able to finish THE MAN WHO GREW YOUNG feeling anything but exalted and joyous. Even I, having read it dozens of time, have never closed it without tears in my eyes. It's almost as if this is not so much a book that I wrote as a book that wrote me.

Product Details

• Paperback: 204 pages
• Publisher: Context Books (August 15, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1893956172
• ISBN-13: 978-1893956179
• Product Dimensions: 10 x 7.8 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,042,062 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars FROM THE AUTHOR, August 17, 2001

By 

Daniel Quinn (Houston, TX USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Man Who Grew Young (Paperback)

THE MAN WHO GREW YOUNG has been in work for many years. It was conceived a decade ago, written first as a prose narrative, then as a screenplay, and finally as a graphic novel, the magnificent art taking several years to prepare. The result is a book that has a special place in my heart, the tale of a great cosmic adventure, mysterious and inspiring.

Someone once told me he didn't want to read ISHMAEL because he "couldn't stand hearing any more bad news." Of course, readers of that book know it's not a bringer of bad news but of enlightenment and hope. Even so, some readers did finish it feeling depressed and hopeless. No one, however, will be able to finish THE MAN WHO GREW YOUNG feeling anything but exalted and joyous. Even I, having read it dozens of time, have never closed it without tears in my eyes. It's almost as if this is not so much a book that I wrote as a book that wrote me.

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fans of Ishamel note: Quinn has done it again!, August 17, 2001

By 

Derrick Jensen (Crescent City, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Man Who Grew Young (Paperback)

Quinn continues to amaze me with the quality of his thought and his continual creativity at coming at the problem of the destructiveness of civilization in new ways. In this book, time is running backwards, and so the air is becoming cleaner as factories convert pollution back into natural materials, oil is pumped back into the ground, and so on. On a personal scale, characters live backwards, too, growing young and eventually rejoining with their mothers. All relationships run backwards. It's an extraordinary way to get us to look at our relationships to each other, and to the planet. And it's a damn good book. I cared deeply about the characters, and kept turning pages to find out what happened to them. Then when I finished the book, I immediately went back to the beginning. When I finished it again, back I went to read it a third time. The illustrations are also extraordinary. I'm not normally a huge fan of graphic novels, but this one is great.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Tale of Our Place in the World..., October 17, 2001

By 

Lance Pierce ((...)USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Man Who Grew Young (Paperback)

Daniel Quinn's latest book is the one he calls his favorite. Like many of his books, it's an impossible one to write, meaning it's an impossible story to tell in book form (much like his work ISHMAEL was for so many years, and which he finally DID manage to write in a way that worked). His latest is The Man Who Grew Young, and thanks to the brilliant efforts of artist Tim Eldred, Daniel was finally able to tell his story of a man suspended in time while the entire universe moved backward around him.

Imagine a world in which you're born by coming out of the ground, old, and in which you grow younger as your life progresses until the day comes when you return to the womb. Imagine one man who for some strange reason lives outside of this process, and who spends his thousands of years searching for the clue to the mystery that he is.

The only way this story could be well told is in graphic novel form, and because it's a graphic novel, it can be easily read in less than an hour. But like most well-written graphic novels, doing so would be doing the story a grave injustice, for this one must be read carefully, and its ideas slowly considered and carefully digested. Daniel lays out a scenario of man's place in the universe, and such a story is NOT to be brushed aside lightly.

Eldred's work is fantastic, and Quinn's story an engaging and inspiring mystery. The man who only grows young when he unravels the mystery of his being could be any of us, searching for our origins and finding it in the only place it could be...where all humanity comes from and where all humanity resides. I found this to be a great read.