Freddy's Book Author:John Gardner, Daniel Biamonte (Illustrator) From one of America's most distinguished and admired novelists - an irresistible novel within a novel, a metaphysical folktale. It begins on a Midwestern campus as an aging, bespectacled professor of Scandinavian history announces to a younger historian and folklorist, "I have a son who's a monster." — And in the middle of the n... more »ight, it is this "monster," Freddy - a painfully shy, obese, eight-foot-tall adolescent (he hides himself away from everyone but his father) - who deposits in the visiting historian's room his book, Freddy's Book: a fabulous tale of sixteenth-century Scandinavia - of lords and peasents, of soldiers, knights, and bishops locked in combat to gain power, to keep it, and to subvert the Devil, whose bargain they all, in various ways, have accepted.
Freddy's creation - its darkness, its clash of temperaments and dreams, its narrow escapes, fierce encounters, and overall tone of profound confrontation-poignantly mirrors the young man's own secret anguish and fantasy, his moving and troubled relationship with his father. And it mirrors as well the sixteenth-century world in which the presence of the Devil and the balance between good and evil were so palpably and adventurously perceived as elements of individual will and destiny.« less