Cohn, I am not that kind, but if you can, imagine Me. The FloodThis is that storyThe heaving high seas were laden with scumThe dull sky glowed redDust and ashes drifted in the wind circling the earthThe burdened seas slanted this way, and that, flooding the scorched land under a daylight moonA black oily rain rainedNo one was thereĪt the end, after the thermonuclear war between the Djanks and Druzhkies, in consequence of which they had destroyed themselves, and, madly, all other inhabitants of the earth, God spoke through a glowing crack in a bulbous black cloud to Calvin Cohn, the paleologist, who of all men had miraculously survived in a battered oceanography vessel with sails, as the swollen seas tilted this way and that Saying this:''Don't presume on Me a visible face, Mr. 'synopsis' may belong to another edition of this title. The novel's fresh and pervasive humor, narrative ingenuity, and tragic sense of the human condition make it one of Malamud's most extraordinary books. With God's Grace, Malamud took a great risk, and it paid off. Cohn works hard to make it possible for God to love His creation again, and his hopes increase as he encounters the unknown and the unforeseen in this strange new world. Soon other creatures appear on their island-baboons, chimps, five apes, and a lone gorilla. This rabbi's son, a 'marginal error,' finds himself shipwrecked with an experimental chimpanzee capable of speech, to whom he gives the name Buz. The novel's protagonist is paleolosist Calvin Cohn, who had been attending to his work at the bottom of the ocean when the Devastation struck, and who alone survived. God's Grace (1982), Bernard Malamud's last novel, is a modern-day dystopian fantasy, set in a time after a thermonuclear war prompts a second flood-a radical departure from Malamud's previous fiction.

God's Grace by Bernard Malamud