The Dork of Cork - Hardcover

Raymo, Chet

3.97

629 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0446517062 ISBN 13: 9780446517065

Publisher: Grand Central Pub, 1993

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Frank Bois, a forty-three-year-old dwarf living in Cork, Ireland, becomes a literary celebrity after penning his autobiography, a work that reveals his fascination with the stars, his love for an unattainable woman, and the story of his haunting, lonely life

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From Kirkus Reviews:

An improbable, sometimes inflated, but often amusing melodrama of the life and loves of a 43-inch Irish dwarf who's an amateur astronomer and soon-to-be-celebrated author--by astronomy professor and author Raymo (In the Falcon's Claw, 1990, etc.). Frank Bois is the ``wee'' son of a French WW II refugee, Bernadette Bois, and an unknown American sailor whose troopship set Bernadette down in the city of Cork in 1945. Frank, now middle-aged and living in the flat where his mother first settled 43 years earlier, has obsessively unearthed details of her past and recounts them in a narrative that parallels that of the book he's about to publish: how his clairvoyant mother, then 12, mysteriously became the only survivor of a German landmine explosion that killed ten other children in Fleurville, France, and how she was celebrated in the town as a saint; how her father, a farmer, was executed by the Germans and her mother went mad; how she stowed away aboard the troopship, ``fukked'' a score of sailors, and became pregnant at 16; how Jack Kelly, the wonderful Irish immigration officer in charge of her case, befriended her and, later, her hideous baby, a dwarf; how Jack taught the dwarf to love beauty and study the stars; how Bernadette, a great beauty herself, drove to ruin a number of men before she, too, went mad and committed suicide; how her son Frank, the dwarf, became a voyeur and pervert after falling unrequitedly in love with one of Jack's six beautiful daughters--a girl named Emma, who also went briefly crazy because of an evil affair with a German astronomer living in Cork; and how, finally- -after endless other adventures and many ruminations on whether beauty is skin-deep or resides in the stars or in the soul--how Frank wins middle-aged Emma's hand in an innocent, pure, romanticized version of marriage. At times overly ``philosophical'' and at other times disconcertingly bawdy, but, overall, an entertaining pastiche. -- Copyright �1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

"Begin with beauty," commands the opening sentence of this powerful novel, suffused with a 19th-century Romantic sensibility; its trite, although heartfelt, closing plea--"Hold me"--encapsulates the narrative's shift in focus from wide-ranging contemplation to the personal realization of love. Set in Cork, Ireland, this philosophic, imaginatively plotted tale is narrated by Frank Bois, a 43-year-old dwarf who has just completed a semi-autobiographical book. In a rambling internal dialogue he reminisces about the events his volume covers: his birth after WW II; his emotionally distant mother, who took many lovers; and his early decision to sublimate his sexuality (after a prostitute told him, "Be gone, ye little dork") by immersing himself in a passion for the moon and stars. Frank interrupts the chronological narrative with personal meditations, some about his writing career; he considers his book a literary freak show, knowing that people are amazed by his appreciation of beauty because, to them, he represents ugliness. Raymo ( In the Falcon's Claw ) so skillfully manipulates the author-within-an-author narration that it's easy to forget that Frank is a fictional entity. His unique, epiphanic and bluntly truthful story forces a reconsideration of the beautiful and the grotesque.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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