CRITICAL PRAISE "Whatever you do, don´t even look into Eckhard Gerdes' book, The Chronicles of Michel du Jabot, because you'll never get out of it again! If J. Joyce were to be reincarnated-and instead of writing in his inextricably reinvented and rather illegible (without the help of an East European multi-lingual scholar) Panglish, were to practice an altogether clear and charmingly grammatical English as here (admittedly with a scatter of soft linguistic implosions but few)-he would have written this book. It will take generations of English professors to sort it out. Hilarious semantic sport. And don't expect me to tell you what it is about. I would have to give you a involuted idio-semantic analysis with innumerable brackets and labels, which wouldn't help anyway. No, okay then, dare to tip-toe into the cavernous echoing brain-chamber of Gerdes' The Chronicles and if you're lucky you'll come tumbling out into the dull everydaylight with a mad enlightened gleam in your eyes and will never read another novel. Yes, this - not Finnegans Wake-is the novel to end the novel. -Alain Arias-Misson, author of Autobiography of a Character from Fiction "Have you seen whales frolicking in the sea-giant masses of shiny wet flesh gracefully rising up into the air and then just as gracefully plunging back into the water? They do it not to catch flies as trout do, food always on their tiny minds, but to delight at their ability to do it, delight at being whales. I rise and plunge, says the whale, therefore I am! And so it is with Eckhard Gerdes in his massive, whale tale kind of a book, The Chronicles of Michel du Jabot-he is not after seducing a reader or two with a suspenseful story into purchasing his book but to exercise the writer in himself, delight at his ability to use language. Gerdes is because he writes." -- Yuriy Tarnawsky, from the Introduction