- Paperback: 191 pages
- Publisher: Penguin Books Australia; Reprint edition (25 Sep 1997)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0140252991
- ISBN-13: 978-0140252996
- Product Dimensions: 19.3 x 13 x 1.5 cm
- Average Customer Review: 1.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 4,167,541 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Synopsis
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.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format: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.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
4 reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
A Guilty Pleasure
9 Aug 2009
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
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...
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
Writing so good, it's a shame the book is not.
18 Jun 2001
Format: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
Irritatingly disappointing
16 Oct 1998
Format: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.
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