A soul shaking clutch of stories about an inadequate man's massively flailing attempts to explain to his daughter the Holocaust (and her mother's suicide). BUT...SHE already KNOWS...
Grendel's parents did not want her. They couldn't even give her a single name. Now she carries her mother's ashes in a girly pink backpack.
Her father frittered his time dreaming a new salvation religion designed for never-ending soft shelled schisms. Her gentle grandfather crafted odd children's tales inappropriately tainted with experiences from Auschwitz. Her ruthless grandfather legacied her an immense trove of resources and burden.
*A strange and uncharted barrage of charming, disquieting stories. The reader never knows whether to laugh, cry, despair of all humanity, or to courageously take heart."
This odd novel is a clutch of stories, poems, songs, and dramas. They coalesce to query the nature of the narratives we create and which, in turn, create us. And it's a prayer.
Are we "really" the stories we tell ourselves we are?
At first, it's the story of an ENORMOUSLY inadequate man and his bumbling attempts to explain certain disturbances to his tiny semi-autistic, hyper-kinetic, and profoundly deaf daughter. Among these disturbances are The Holocaust and its ever-rippling consequences for their family including the suicide of his wife (HER mother). But "Gredible" has cochlear implants she employs to shut down audible input-or to surreptitiously listen and absorb. Not that her dopy Fat Dad is ever particularly circumspect about what he says in front of her.
But when his daughter's body betrays the inexorable symptoms of outgrowing her childhood, what churses does he gotz?
There's also the legacies of the child's two grandfathers, each with aged arms scarred with bleak tattoos. Before one died, he strived with gentle strangeness to inoculate her (and all men's children) from human evil, creating absurdly inappropriate "stories" with input from Gredible and her Fat Dad. Her other grandfather fiercely refused to tell tales or conceal secrets, but nevertheless was at the center of all manner of unsettling questions as he careened through life accumulating obscene levels of great wealth.
Still, somehow prior to language or even cognition, little Saint Gredible is burdened with her own type of somatic "knowledge" about what all adults are ever fumbling.
She is her own type of disturbance, and WE ARE ALL THE BIG BANG!
Saint Gredible and Her Fat Dad's Mass is a comic agitation and open-ended agony about the consequence of bringing ANY new being into our streaming rush of existence with all its ferocious push and accelerating forces. And given multiple legacies from her many progenitors, this child is rigidly constituted to accept neither victimhood or passivity.
We are created and condemned only to create in infinitely increasing dimensions.
Only Forward. Ever Forward!
