Customer Reviews (1)

A troubling book....
AS a feminist, I found the story of the white male teacher at the girl's school shocking and revolting, but it is an interesting depiction of the typical male fear of Woman's power. Also of note is where Hawkes whinesabout how a "Marxist critic" (actually the courageous andbrilliant guerilla theorist Richard Feldstein) challenged him in public.Oh, poor Mr. Hawkes! The rest of the book is padded with snipped excerptsfrom his books, which, if you like that sort of thing, I imagine you wouldlike this book. ... Read more

Product Description
While investigating his mentor's life and death, Michael, a voyeuristic fashion photographer, travels through a Dionysian landscape where sex is daydream, women and horses share the same erotic power, and perversity is the rule. In his search, Michael uses photographs and paintings to visualize the past and thereby expose a family's decadent legacy of sex, lies, and betrayal.

An inventive mix of biography, history, erotica, and classic whodunit, Whistlejacket is John Hawkes at his best as he blurs the distinction between death and desire, image and language, art and morality. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Haunting atmosphere and tale.
I love Hawkes' writing.His An Irish Eye and the Blood Oranges are very good as well.Somehow he infuses a vbrant life into even his darker, stranger stories so that everything seems alive and full of light evenwhile twisting in agony.Describing his writing is difficult as his styleis unique.He was one of the top American writers of alltime.

Whistlejacket is a fun read just for some of the short descriptivescenes and the subtelty with which Hawkes laces the interactions betweenhis characters.

Oh, if you dislike horses, this book is not for you.

Hawkes sure can write.
Man he's good.A friend of mine, or rather an acquaintence at this point, had Hawkes for a lecturer in school.And he was described to me as this geeky college prof and nothing out of the ordinary.I read a few of hisearlier books (The 'Blood Oranges', 'Second Skin', and 'The Lime Twig') andit amazed me that this dude could make my skin crawl like that.I pickedup 'Whistlejacket' and thought 'well this guys aged some I bet he'smellowed a little bit'.At first I thought I was right but it's more likeNolan Ryan's later years on the mound.Hawkes still delivers.He's justlearned all the tricks and lures the the reader into an unwarranted senseof security.Later that old sick stomach comes back to haunt you. ... Read more

Product Description
The story within this beautiful limited edition is about Virginie, an 11-year-old girl leading two lives — one as a servant to the aristocratic Seigneur, a creator of erotically receptive women for the decadent nobility, in 1740; the other as the young sister to a Parisian taxi driver, a patron of a circle of prostitutes, in 1945.
... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

I Return There
Needless to say which of the two reviewers (as I currently post) I tend to agree with. Apart from anything else this book has my favourite-of-all-time definition of love:

"Innocence is the clarity with which the self shows forth the self. Love is the respect we feel for innocence."

One of the worst books ever
This book is terrible, from the ridiculous plots to the decidedly unsexy erotic scenes.Avoid unless you like really bad prose for its camp value. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

OUTDATED!
Next to NONE of the information provided in this book is still accurate! The programs have changed!

Questions raised are mundane and obvious. A few are valuable
I bought this book when I was interested in a cultural exchange my sophomore year.Unfortunately, I applied to late and wasn't able to go.This book has a nice introductory section on the history of travelling academics, though it was not insightful enough, with enough original source material, or with enought facinating details to capture my interest and encourage me to think differently, or more profoundly about the exchange experience.Stories of how people should expect to feel emotionally in the exchange process are useful.I found though, that chapters like "Should You Go? A Self-Test Questionaire" asked questions like "Have you shown interest before in other countries and other cultures?", "Do you speak other languages, or have you decided to take language courses in high school?" or "Do you consider yourself to be self-confident?How do you handle situations that require strong self control?" to be mostly useless.I knew beforehand why I wanted to go on an exchange -- to experience a new land and culture.A surprising portion of the book raises questions that I had already answered, and found them irritating.

Great guide for choosing an exchange program
This book is great! I could have used this book when I was going abroad for a year when I was in high school. I work at a foreign exchange program and I read this book as research for what is out there, and I have to saythis book was great! Anyone contemplating going abroad needs a copy of thisbook! ... Read more

Product Description
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.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 toperfection by Kafka as well as inthe tradition of "magical realists" such as Laura Esquivel(Like Water for Chocolate). We are never sure if the frog isreal or imagined (just as we are never certain if Gregor Samsareally has turned into a giant cockroach), or what, ifanything, the frog--or the boy's experiences--might symbolize. Hawkesrevels in maintaining this tension of the suspension of suspension ofdisbelief, and for those of us who love ambiguity, The Frog isan exotic and well-presented literary treat. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

A Guilty Pleasure
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...

Writing so good, it's a shame the book is not.
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.

The Frog
This book is as densely rich and layered as its main character.

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