Word: cau
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...MERCY OF GOD (310 pp.)-Jean Cau-Atheneum...
...cell pass the time. They call their quaint little game The Torture of Joan of Arc, and it is a symptom of their terrible sense of guilt, which consumes them as the flames consume the roach. A preoccupation with guilt is nothing new for modern French novelists, but Jean Cau. 37, examines the meaning of guilt more exhaustively than even Camus or Sartre-though not always with their clarity. A controversial journalist as well as a novelist and playwright, Cau won the 1961 Prix Goncourt for The Mercy...
...Crime of Birth. Cau's four characters are so overwhelmed by guilt that they cannot recall the actual crimes that landed them in prison. They cannot distinguish between the people they felt like murdering and those they actually did murder; they feel as guilty for their thoughts as for their deeds. In brooding conversations in their cell, they mull over the infinite possibilities of their guilt in the neorealist manner made familiar by Robbe-Grillet's Last Year at Marienbad...
With rare insight, Cau traces the growth of guilt in his characters. After the death of his brother, his parents' favorite child, the doctor fell ill and tried to atone by dying. In his sickbed, he saw (or did he imagine?) his mother trying on her mourning finery and soothing him: "You're going to go away to be nice to Mama, aren't you, my love? You won't get well like a bad little boy . . ." Match was sure he had insulted his parents by being born ugly: "I was never entitled to the qualities...