Fredy Neptune
Subtitle: a novel in verse
By: Les Murray.
Publisher: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux; Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 1999
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 255
Subjects: World War, 1914-1918 -- Australia -- Poetry.; Germans -- Australia -- Poetry.; Leprosy -- Patients -- Poetry.; Strong men -- Poetry.; Soldiers -- Poetry.; Australia -- Poetry.
Genres: Poetry.
Description: When German-Australian sailor Friedrich "Fredy" Boettcher is shanghied aboard a German Navy battleship at the outbreak of World War I, the sight of frenzied mobs burning Armenian women to death in Turkey causes him, through moral shock, to lose his sense of touch. This mysterious disability, which he knows he must hide, is both protection and curse during much of his life, as he orbits the high horror and low humor of a catastrophic age.

Told in blue-collar English that regains freshness by eschewing the mind-set of literary language, Fredy's picaresque life - as, perhaps, the only Nordic Superman ever - is deep-dyed in layers of irony and attains a mind-inverting resolution.