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Mendel's Dwarf

Harmony/Penguin, US (1998); Doubleday/Anchor, UK (1997)


"...[a] furious, tender, and wittily erudite book." The New Yorker

 

A finalist for one of the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes for 1999. One of the New York Public Library's "Books to Remember, 1998"

Mendel's Dwarf is a compassionate contemplation of a life that is, in many ways, terribly unfair. This novel takes us to the brave new world of genetic science through the eyes and heart of a man who knows that his own particular strain of humanity will have no place in it.


Behind the walls of a mid-19th-century Austrian monastery, Gregor Mendel carried out experiments with garden peas that ignited the modern science of genetics. More than a hundred years later, Dr. Benedict Lambert, Mendel's great-great-great nephew, is a brilliant geneticist, and, ironically, a dwarf. The target of his research is the single gene that caused him.

Inured to the world's sidelong stares and ill-disguised curiosity, Ben never expected to find anything approaching reciprocated love -- until he met Jean. Weaving the life of Ben's distant Uncle Gregor and Ben's own tender, sardonic, unexpectedly erotic story, Mendel's Dwarf is a novel that questions the meaning of normality and sounds the depths of passion in a world that is drifting ever further from the old moral certainties.

 

 

 
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