3 Review(s)

Born in Berlin in November 1940, Elias Deane Grimm Lohr, who has goneby Grimm Lohr since he was a child, narrates the fascinating events of hislife and his family against the backdrop of the twentieth century, offeringas honest a replication of the facts as he can.Grimm begins by recounting his German-British grandfather’s service as a physician inGermany during the First World War, and then the life of his own father, the assistant tothe official translator of the German government during the Third Reich who disappearedwith the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad. After spending time in the South Pacificwhere his American grandfather served as a diplomat during the Second World War,Grimm and his family move to Normal, Illinois, where he matures, studies theater atNorthwestern University, and eventually moves to Los Angeles to seek employment inthe film and televison industries. As he pursues a career as a screenwriter and actor duringthe 1970s and 1980s, he encounters, among others, a boisterous producer, a counterculturedirector, a cannibalistic stalker, and the love of his life—a famous actress whoholds a dark secret. Finally tiring of the Hollywood scene, he decides to try to patent andmanufacture a device based in part on the work of his grandfather, a device also covetedby one of the world’s richest men, and the ensuing conflict leads Grimm to a remoteand mysterious archipelago in the middle of the Indian Ocean called Morro Burra.The Revelations of Grimm Lohr is a satirical and outrageous novel that explores the eventsof the twentieth century as told through three generations of a German-American family.