Bob or Man on Boat A Novel Author:Peter Markus "In an unforeseeable counterpoint to Heraclitus dictum No man steps in the same river twice, Peter Markus offers the opposite wisdom: the river is always the same river, and we who step in it become the river, become the same. Only an innocent eye can see the river so. Only an innocent eye can see that in its muddy depths the river hides a secre... more »t whose nature is to be continually revealed. Here, in this river-world, where every character with a name is named Bob, where men turn into fish, where fish turn into men, where magic works darkly in the mud, where boys turn into their fathers, where dreams reveal the world, where the stars swim in the sky s river, where hands are covered in fish scales, where the river sings to us of our origins and of our ends, to see is to baptize the mind in the river. Markus world is not old because it never ceased living in wonder. It is a mythic world and ever-new. When Markus sings his voice is chorus. Melville s Ahab is in there. So is Hawthorne. So are the Brothers Grimm. So are Faulkner and Jung. But those voices return to, and harmonize with, some deeper, more sonorous Anonymity, that bodiless voice which utters every story, whose voice is itself a river, and who chooses, among countless thousands, one humble mouth to sing its story through. That voice is spoken for us by Peter Markus. And this novel is one of those songs." Dan Beachy-Quick« less