Brief and compact, the novel focuses on the extraordinary fate and person of one hero, Joachim Mahlke, fourteen years old when the story starts. Mahlke is set apart from his fellows by an unusual excrescence of cartilage, a huge Adam's apple, sign and symbol of precocious virility, at once embarrassing and stimulating to its bearer. When a classmate sics a cat on Mahlke's "mouse," he unwittingly launches him on a hero's career. In order to compensate for his mouse, Mahlke turns himself into an athlete and ace diver who brings up from a half-submerged ship all kinds of hardware to string around his neck. He becomes "The Great Mahlke," first to his classmates and later to the nation. Mahlke's mentors, however, refuse to be impressed. For the cat watching him, ready to pounce, is a society of petty men.

Nobel Prize for Literature, 1999.