God's Grace
A Novel
ISBN10: 0374529671
ISBN13: 9780374529673
Trade Paperback
240 Pages
$26.00
CA$35.25
God's Grace, Bernard Malamud's last novel, is a modern-day dystopian fantasy, set in a time after a thermonuclear war prompts a second flood—a radical departure from his previous fiction.
The novel's protagonist is paleologist Calvin Cohn, who had been attending to his work at the bottom of the ocean when the Devastation struck, and who alone survived. This rabbi's son—a "marginal error"—finds himself shipwrecked with an experimental chimpanzee capable of speech, to whom he gives the name Buz. Soon other creatures appear on their island-baboons, chimps, five apes, and a lone gorilla. Cohn works hard to make it possible for God to love His creation again, and his hopes increase as he encounters the unknown and the unforeseen in this strange new world.
With God's Grace, Malamud took a great risk, and it paid off. The novel's fresh and pervasive humor, narrative ingenuity, and tragic sense of the human condition make it one of Malamud's most extraordinary books.
Reviews
Praise for God's Grace
"In this final moment of [Malamud's] brilliant career, the reader can feel a trembling urgency just below the surface: a writer's desperate need to shatter the rosy one-way mirror that stands between literature and life."—Dara Horn, from the Introduction
"Malamud's vision is personal, original, and almost wholly unrelated to the most characteristic or normative Jewish thought and tradition. As for Malamud's style, it too is a peculiar (and dazzling) invention."—Harold Bloom
Reviews from Goodreads
BOOK EXCERPTS
Read an Excerpt
God's Grace
The Flood
This is that story
The heaving high seas were laden with scum
The dull sky glowed red
Dust and ashes drifted in the wind circling the earth
The burdened seas slanted this way, and that, flooding...