From Library Journal
Jacobs's entertaining new novel (following Beautiful Soup: A Novel for the 21st Century, Celadon, 1993) is inspired by real events. The Cardiff Giant was one of the greatest hoaxes of the previous century. Discovered in October 1869 on a farm in New York, the 10' tall, 3000-lb. statue was thought by "experts" to be the petrified remains of a prehistoric man but was shortly revealed to be the brainchild of George Hull, of Binghamton, New York, who had the Giant carved by stonemasons in Chicago. Thousands paid to look at the giant, which excited the envy even of P.T. Barnum. Jacobs juggles a large cast of both real (e.g., Tom Thumb, Cornelius Vanderbilt) and fictional characters, all of whom find their lives changed by their involvement with the Cardiff Giant. This is a very funny, rambunctiously raunchy novel that, at the same time, makes pointed comments about American attitudes during the last half of the 19th century. The relative dearth of recent humorous fiction should make this novel welcomed by most public library patrons.?Nancy Pearl, Washington Ctr. for the Book, Seattle
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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édition.
From Kirkus Reviews
A fascinating picaresque novel, set in postCivil War America, by the underrated comic surrealist whose previous fiction includes The Egg of the Glak (1969). First things first: This is a masterpiece. It's the story, based on fact, of a hoax perpetrated in 1869 by one George Hull, black-sheep son of a Binghamton, New York, cigar-making family, who, upon hearing an overzealous preacher's assertion that the biblical ``Giants in those days'' may have existed in America, hires sculptors to construct a huge simulated human figure, buries it on his cousin's Cardiff, New York, farm, and arranges for the ``discovery'' of what will thereafter be known (and widely advertised as) ``the Cardiff Giant.'' Among those who scramble for a piece of the giant, and the action, are plutocrat Cornelius Vanderbilt, showman extraordinaire P.T. Barnum (who harbors presidential ambitions), actor Edwin Booth, scheming boxing promoters who exhibit ``Battling Mammoths,'' journalist Barnaby Race (who seeks both the truth and a good story), and a less-than- heavenly host of clergy, grifters, and dupes who display several highly amusing varieties of mass hysteria. The novel is a poker- faced paean to American enterprise, hucksterism, and criminality, energized by Jacobs's easy mastery of period detail and rhetoric (he even contrives a marvelously florid verse attributed to an impressionable poet who visits ``the giant's'' remains). And, in a spectacular magic-realist twist, Jacobs presents (in italicized interpolated fragments of dialogue) what seem to be the thoughts of the nonexistent giant--``created,'' perhaps, by George Hull's greed and by his country's hunger to believe in such marvels. P.T. Barnum sums up George Hull's nefarious accomplishment beautifully: ``What you did was a wonder and a legend for the ages. A beautiful scam and splendidly wrought.'' The same may be said of Harvey Jacobs's stunningly inventive and charming fiction--arguably this year's best novel. --
Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
--Ce texte provient de la
Hardcover
édition.
