The Dork of Cork Meets Kafka's Metamorphosis

There's been an entity out there writing lesson plans for my reading and thematic development again.  I started watching movies like crazy in the last few weeks and two of them were Love Guru and The Station Agent.  They both feature small people.  The book I finally finished has a small person in it too.  A dwarf.  One resplendent with a blatant, lustful crush for his pediatric doctor; a pink, dirty Disneyland sweatshirt he wears everyday; and flaking skin, that severe sort of eczema which comes off in peels.  

Around fifteen years ago, my college advisor handed me Chet Raymo's Dork of Cork.  The dwarf in this story creates a language of beauty in his passionate dialogue about astronomy.  It is inspiring in the way that the main character can speak beauty despite the consensus on his ugly appearance.  He weaves tones of loving beauty about the stars.  This all comes out of him despite the fact that no love comes to him.

Dwarfs.  What's the fascination in marvelling at their deformity?  There's all those shows on them as well.  And Mike Myers has entirely too much fun abusing the "Mini-me" in his Austin Powers movies.

Well, step back people.  The dwarf in the book The Convalescent doesn't sputter about stars to distract himself from his painful existence.  He's quite frank about his feelings.  It's hard imagining such a small person so caustically sarcastic or perverse.  Or worse, would you imagine it? 

The author Jessica Anthony did.  The way she did it, makes me wonder why.  Did she decide that these marginalized people deserve to be portrayed as human? 

What's more interesting is the historiographical commentary that she weaves throughout from the dwarf voice of Rovar Pfliegman.  He's describing his lineage.  Her bibliography at the back is quite extensive.  She links the dwarf line to the Hungarians in some fascinating way.  What's she trying to say with this?  That these deformed, freaks of nature deserve to have their ancestry played out for everyone to hear about?  She's trying to assert that their tale is a part of the grand human story-telling?  While "normal-sized" humans have been dumbstruck and morbidly intrigued by the physical lot of dwarfs, there's an important link missing in our attention to them? 

They have a history of their own.  Of course, and they've been such little people all this time.  Maybe it was just figured that their history was so small a microscope wouldn't be able to magnify it.

Is she trying to get the rest of us to ask why they should take up any more than the smaller space they've been allotted in the grander scheme of things?  Oops.  Really, that's all handing it out in the same satirical tone she wrote the book in.  A better formulated question would be: why haven't we heard their human history?  Have we really been preoccupied all this time with their appearance?  How shallow us "normal-sized" people can be!!!

Of course, I had to fall in love with this book because... well, there's books in it!  This dwarf who sells meat out of the side of a little bus has a library of his own.  One of his handful of books tells the story of his people.  It sounds satirical hearing how these books came to him, how he cherishes them, and how they play a role in his life.  Except the satirical finger feels like it's pointed to humans of larger stature, and how they've regarded certain stories as large.

What's an even bigger satirical statement is how the author takes a stab at a classic and offers up a transformation which reminds me of a picture in a mirror where the image is distorted, magnified larger than it really is.  "Normal-sized"  humans have a tendency to do that, magnify their own image: this book seems to whisper to me.  The sound of the whisper, though, is so small.  I'm not quite sure that my big brain has managed to grasp the message very well.