God's Fool

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In God’s Fool Mark Slouka, the acclaimed author of Lost Lake and Other Stories, presents us with an unparalleled novel about Chang and Eng, the original Siamese twins. In a masterstroke of creative storytelling, we experience their lives through Chang’s eyes. Despite the incomparable predicament of their physical condition, Chang is wrapped in ordinary grace and suffering, searching for tranquility as he travels from Siam’s marketplace to Parisian salons, to London’s underworld and P.T. Barnum’s side show, all the while improbably connected to a man who becomes his sworn enemy. In a last attempt at a normal life, Chang and Eng retire from the sideshow and move to the American South where they marry two sisters and Chang finds short-lived peace and redemption in his love for his son Christopher. This peace, however, is overtaken as events in their adopted home country force them into a final terrifying battle with fate.From Publishers WeeklySiamese twins Chang and Eng, who caused a sensation 160 years ago, when they were exhibited by P.T. Barnum, still hold a mysterious fascination Slouka's version of their story is the second novel dedicated to their vicissitudes in the last two years (the other being Darin Strauss's Chang and Eng). Chang, at the beginning of the book, is in his declining years. He and Eng have become sworn enemies at one point they even try to kill one another. Their enmity comes after they retire from Barnum's American Museum and buy a plantation, with its complement of slaves, in North Carolina, and Eng, much to Chang's chagrin, becomes a fundamentalist Christian. While Eng approves of Chang's marital relations with his wife, Addy, both brothers remember Chang's first affair: it was in Paris, their first season in Europe, with Sophia Marchant, a famous beauty. Chang's memories move toward her and away, as he trawls his past, going back to his and Eng's first astonishing appearance in the world (at the sight of the two, their mother's midwives fled). From a Siamese notoriety the king of Siam's astrologers took their birth as an evil omen they move to Europe, under the aegis of Robert Hunter, an opium trader and impresario. Slouka, a gifted stylist, eschews much of the freak-show energy that thrust Chang and Eng onto the stage of world history, in favor of an alluring balance between the elegiac and the ironic. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. From Library JournalSlouka's exceptional first novel opens with a description of an apple fight among young Confederate soldiers awaiting orders from General Longstreet to begin the infamous Pickett's charge. Reflecting on this, the narrator (father to one of the boys) asks, "What manner of God ... would turn them, laughing, to blood and bone?" The same God, it turns out, who would cause one of them to eat so many green apples that he ends up sick, pants around his ankles, as his comrades march off to their doom. We are all God's fools, it seems. While this episode lies at the heart of the novel, the narrative is quite wide-ranging. The boy's father happens to be Chang, one of the famous Siamese twins brought to America by Phineas Barnum, and it is his (and, inevitably, his brother Eng's) story that Soulka details. This fascinating tale traces their birth and childhood in Siam, their travels and abandonment in Europe, the Barnum years, and their lives as slaveholding farmers in North Carolina (something of any irony in itself). Part historical novel, part commentary on the human condition, this powerful and often poetic novel belongs on the shelves of all public and most academic libraries. David W. Henderson, Eckerd Coll. Lib., St. Petersburg, FL Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.