Word: grau
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...kinky love triangle about a promising young writer and two women on the leading edge of fashion and sexual mechanics. The setting is the coast of southern France during the mid-1920s. The sun is strong, the water clean, the food good and true. Best of all, the hotel Grau du Roi is a fine place to be a writer named David Bourne, honeymooning and working on a story of a youth and his father tracking a killer elephant in the African bush...
...ingratiating "documentary" novel called The Frog Who Dared to Croak (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 182 pages; $11.95). The author, as odd and ingratiating as his book, is Richard Sennett, 39, better known as an omnivorously brilliant professor of sociology at New York University. Sennett's hero, Tiber Grau, finds the folktale version of the frog story "pessimistic" and "not entirely clear." Grau is at this point a propaganda official in the short-lived Hungarian revolutionary regime of 1919, so he has the authority to rewrite the nation's folklore. In his revised version, the frogs croak so loudly...
...Tibor Grau still has much to learn. The son of a Jewish banker named Von Grau, a furtive homosexual, a teacher and philosopher of sorts, he survives wartime exile in Stalin's U.S.S.R. by following the principle: "You must lie to survive. But what is a lie?" The tale of the frogs keeps reappearing in new forms. Military Interpreter Grau tells it to some German war prisoners as a parable of how an arrogant team of jumping frogs lost at the Olympics. During the Hungarian revolt of 1956, finally, Grau becomes one of six Hungarians designated to negotiate with...
...enigmatic and unsatisfying conclusion? "But I didn't want, to write a book about the great rebels, who are really heroic, but about some more ordinary being," Sennett says with a smile, as he pours white wine for a visitor to his Manhattan home. "Grau thinks he has told the truth, finally, and taken a risk. But he's so warped by the system that what appears to him a risk is in fact a defense of the system. And yet he has dignity, because under those conditions of self-deception, he has done what he thinks...
...Joachim Grau...