Word: bazin
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CONSTANCE, by Hervé Bazln (216 pp.; Crown; $3). French Author Bazin's novels (Viper in the Fist, Head Against the Walls) are as alive, cynical and human as the Paris Flea Market, but like that fascinating catchall, they end by suggesting that the props of life, and finally life itself, add up to a shabby bargain. In this work. Heroine Constance, hopelessly crippled in a World War II bombing, has no intention of divorcing herself from the world. Transformed from a good-looking, athletic girl into an object of pity, she determines to live through other people. Flip...
...Author Bazin exhibits almost shockingly sharp insights into human nature and more sympathy for the human race than he has shown before. But he seems satisfied with a single tour through the market of humanity. Given the same characters and the same idea, Dostoevsky or Dickens would have turned them into a permanent exhibit of the human condition...
Arthur himself is a dreary specimen, but what happens to him is often fascinating. Novelist Bazin writes with impressive authority about the treatment of patients, the warm baths in which they are lulled, the prolonged torpor and occasional flights of excitement in which they subsist, the subtle divisions of status that arise among them, as if in mocking duplicate of the outer world...
...weakness of Head Against the Wall is that nowhere does its author show the causes of Arthur's collapse. At one or two points Novelist Bazin hints that his hero is a persecuted rebel, and the publisher, taking up this cue, describes Arthur as "a young man victimized by a degenerate environment." On the evidence of the novel, however, Arthur victimizes society a bit more than society victimizes...
Thirty-five-year-old Novelist Bazin may have a sneaking sympathy for his hero. As a youngster, he took his father's car, skidded into a tree, went through the windshield headfirst, and spent two years in an asylum for "pathological deviation of intellectual kind." There, however, whatever resemblance Bazin may seem to have to his hero ceases. Since his discharge, Bazin has established himself as one of France's promising young authors...