The Crocodile

The Crocodile (1792) is a brilliant epic, one of those rare books of which one can say that no one ever wrote anything else like it. The eponymous Crocodile is an attempted saboteur of the Divine Plan, an instrument of the Adversary, who claims to have created and shaped the universe-but who is, after all, a liar. As for the divinity, he remains invisible, but is described as a jeweler whose wife who supervises a Society of Independents, the members of which never meet but are always in session. Add to these concepts a plague of books, which reduces human knowledge to a soggy pulp; the sunken city of Atalante, where everything stopped dead at the moment of its submersion; and the fact that the ultimate hope of a beleaguered Paris in the face of diabolical catastrophe is an aging Jew armed with a little box, and the cocktail is, to say the least, original and appealing to the connoisseurs of the bizarre.