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From Publishers Weekly
In this grim, H.G. Wellsian fable, an unnamed European of unspecified nationality is hired to spend an unspecified mid-20th-century year logging wind conditions on a tiny Antarctic island. Anticipating solitude, the bookish young man soon discovers that he has a neighbor—the pathologically reclusive Gruner—and that each night, the island is overrun by humanoid killer amphibians. He and brutish Gruner—who has tamed a "toad" of his own—join forces, killing monsters by night and fornicating with Gruner's pet by day. Inspired by the creature's ability to laugh and cry—to say nothing of her perky breasts, knack for housework and wordless submissiveness—the narrator begins to think of the cold-blooded creatures as human. When he tries to befriend them and their children, his efforts pacify the humanoids, but not Gruner; the hopeful idyll ends when the older man launches a last suicidal effort to exterminate the "monsters." Gruner's death plunges our hero into a rut of battle, drunkenness and bestiality so complete that when his replacement arrives, he has become as feral as Gruner was before him. Sentence by elegant sentence, Piñol's first novel offers a tightly crafted allegory of human brutality both fascinating and repellent. (Nov.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Booklist
This first novel, by an anthropologist, is a dizzying, surreal account by an unnamed narrator who arrives on a desolate Antarctic island for a yearlong post as a British weather official. Upon his arrival, he finds the only other human inhabitant of the island to be nearly mad, and he soon discovers why: a swarm of reptilian sea-creatures crawls from the ocean each night in an attempt to kill the humans inhabiting their island. Life there becomes a matter purely of survival, but as the year progresses, the narrator, quite predictably, begins to question the very nature of survival. What is its purpose? It is not surprising that this novel becomes a philosophical tract, musing on the "true" definition of love, passion, intelligence, society, and, ultimately, humanity. Heavy-handed as it can be at times, it is still gruesomely riveting. The author's anthropology background becomes quite clear toward the end, when the narrator begins to attempt his own study of the "monsters." If a reader can suspend disbelief, this becomes a fascinating novel and treatise. Debi Lewis
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
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