Good Reads meta-data is 339 pages, rated 4.25 by four litizens.
Genre: Krimi.
DNA: Georgia, USA.
Verdict: Acute.
Tagline: Petunia did it, and how!
A hapless graduate student in a genetics PhD program observes the ignorant, solipsistic, corrupt, narcissistic, venal, alcoholic members of the department who ingest illegal substances, give rabbits lesson in libido, cheat and lie in research, and hate each other, enslave grad students, while the student befriends a gun-toting house maid, a voodoo practicing untenured English professor, a jive-talking janitor with occult powers and a cartographic knowledge of drain pipes, and then there is the soon-to-be, and sooner-not-to-be, Doctor Frankenstein.
The touch is light but the macabre ending is not. Be forewarned.
Here are some of les bons mots, many of them quotations from literature. The author is clearly a reader of far more than genetics research.
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‘To come with a well-informed mind is to come with an inability of administering,’ quoth Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey.
He was a monk of science, who devoted himself to his calling, ignoring minor matters of light, air, sleep, or food.
Only fiction has to seem possible, reality does not.
Words advanced to convince her were doomed soldiers sent on a suicide mission.
To quote Confucius: ‘The wise man is informed in what is right. The inferior man is informed in what will pay.’ No prizes for guessing which sort dominates the academy in these pages.
Most men believe to be true whatever they want to be true. So said Caesar. he could say it today as long as he includes women.
Always to be right, always to trample forward, and never to doubt. William Thackeray, Vanity Fair might have been describing the successful professoriate.
Each day I received four or five emails from the university designed to relieve it of all responsibility for anything I might do or not do or think about doing or have done in the past. Daily, it disowned me and my works.
How void of reason are men, said Seneca. (Had he been watching Fox News?)
They may plan to burn you at the stake, but they begin with innocuous questions.
Selfishness has to be forgiven because there is no cure, Jane Austen, Mansfield Park.
How few know their own good, and fewer still who purse it, John Dryden in his introduction to Juvenal’s Satire X.
No amount of money is compensation for the grind of graduate school. (Amen. Hardest thing I ever did.)
To hate all the hate-worthy people leaves one no energy for anything else, Arthur Schopenhauer, Studies in Pessimism.
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Gupta and I also did some vocabulary building: valetudinarian, maleficent, undulant, diurnal, stellate, arithmomania, flensed, eldritch, professosis, hebetade, ethology, soi-disant, and more. (Yes, some are coinages.)
I see from the author’s Research Gate entry that he has retired from the lists of competition for research grants. Therein he describes this book as ‘a satire of academic life, based largely on my own experience (with names changed to protect the guilty).’ He is not going to be applying for more research grants after this delightful hatchet job.
I certainly recognised some of the personalities from my part of the jungle.
I read it during our stay at the zoo. Seemed fitting, right, Petunia?