“Professor Berard has accomplished the almost unimaginable feat of composing a lengthy satire, stylistically inspired by the Greek genre known as
Menippean, i.e., a mixture of prose and poetry, and by the witty E.T.A. Hoffmann. Inspired by these two, he has composed an American satire that opens with hexameters satirizing, appropriately enough, that most American of institutions, Disneyland. The author’s command of Latin is truly virtuosic and I would say of his impressive achievement, as Cicero did of Lucretius’s poem, that it is ‘multis luminibus ingeni, multae tamen artis,’ a work ‘marked by many flashes of genius and much skill.’ Readers who have lamented that Apuleius, the mad-cap, linguistically virtuosic author of
The Golden Ass
, did not follow up his novel with another similarly delicious work, will rejoice when they discover in Professor Berard, a twenty-first century Apuleius.”
—Dr. Albert R. Baca, Emeritus Professor, Department of Modern and Classical Languages, California State University, Northridge
“In this twenty-first century of ours there are still Apuleii. Stephen Berard offers to readers of Latin a Milesian tale in which prose is mixed with hexameters, novel with philosophy, the clear with the arcane, modern subjects with ancient style, and all this with enormous linguistic facility and imaginative richness. Those familiar with Ernest Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann will recognize in this work the ‘fantastic realism’ which that writer is said to have invented and with which Berard openly declares an intimate familiarity. While you tackle Berard’s use of language, which is not always easy, you will find yourself, as it were, dear reader, in something of a Fellini-esque river.”
—Dr. Guy Licoppe and Francisca Deraedt, editors of Melissa , Brussels, Belgium
“Stephen Berard, already the author of some Latin-language works (such as the physics book, De philosophia quantali deque institutione publica ), although he has quite ingeniously borrowed certain elements from the works of ancient writers, is nevertheless always very much his own man when composing verses and shaping his prose. His narrations are polished, witty, and clever. This extremely skilled professor of Latin uses language that is sometimes grave and sometimes comical and so fluid that this novel, whose language is unique in the variety of its vocabulary and its modes of expression, seems extremely well suited to attracting the attention of readers. Indeed it is to be hoped that fortune will smile on this work and this writer, who, it is fair to say, has ‘won the the palm’ with this Menippean.”
—Vittorio Ciarrocchi, “Grex Latine Loquentium” participant and writer