THE MARGIN

by Andre Pieyre de Mandiargues ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 1968

Pieyre de Mandiargues is one of the older, post-Apollinaire surrealists known here only for the erotic assignations of his girl on The Motorcycle (1965). This novel won the Goncourt in 1967, a choice which met with both consternation and protest. While to a degree submersed in the phallic phantasms of the earlier book, it is a more substantive, allusive, metaphysically tantalizing work shuttling between precise details and associative images. Just as the central character is dangling between reality and its suspension (he has ""lived in the margin""). All of this (virtually nothing in terms of a narrative) takes place during two days in Barcelona after Sigismond, salesman of brandies, married five years, receives a letter which he reads only partially -- the lines which say that his wife Sergine has jumped from a water tower. In this interim before he returns to the letter, in toto, he wanders through the barrio of Barcelona, sleeps with a whore, visits the museum, eats, shaves, etc., etc. These are all pursuits that prompt his resilient observations, conjectures, parallels, projections in which the past (his faggot-father and his own unlikely origins; more recently his life with the tremendously vivacious Sergine) and the present now converge. . . It is a work one admires (however one tires) for M. de Mandiargues' merciless, crowded configurations and for the motility of his imaginative powers.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1968

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Grove

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1968

Categories: FICTION