Word: conrad
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...title is ironic: the unwanted plant is the author. All his life, Conrad Detrez, 48, has been inflamed by credos and causes. The Belgian youth became an ardent mystic and prepared for the monastic life at the Roman Catholic University of Louvain in the 1950s. A few years later he was a lay missionary in Brazil. There he was appalled by the misery of the masses he had come to inspire with the message of Christ. Soon he had become a follower of Marx and Che Guevara and a guerrilla fighting with the Communists. Eventually he was tried and convicted...
...Young Conrad, the hero of the novel, grows up in a Belgian village in a home overrun with luxuriant potted plants. The hothouse upbringing keeps him devout, unworldly and suppliant. At a Catholic school he yearns to become a saint. Tormented by sexual feelings, he admits to his spiritual adviser that "two flies had landed on the page of one of my treatises and were fornicating and I didn't stop them." Conrad makes up for his lustful thoughts by committing holy books to memory and praying for the conversion of atheists. His confessions become so monotonously pure minded...
...Catholic seminary in Louvain, however, Conrad is unsettled by the fierce theological disputes that follow in the wake of the Second Vatican Council of 1962. When a confused fellow seminarian from Brazil quits before ordination, Conrad follows him into the secular world and, ultimately, to Brazil. In Lydia Davis' evocative translation, the pages Detrez devotes to Rio de Janeiro's celebrated carnival constitute a showpiece of brilliant costumes, seductive rhythms and collective madness. On occasion, the prose becomes as overheated as the event: "Three million men and women ... shouted, drank, pinched one another, capered about and formed snakes...
Back at home, Conrad is once again engulfed in vegetation grown rank with lack of care. "With my hands," he recalls, "I made a breach in the thick curtain of asparagus ferns that tumbled down from the top of the wardrobe and floated like puffs of smoke between the floor and the ceiling." There, amid the old green plants that recall a painting by Henri Rousseau, he reflects upon the failures of religion and revolt. Fortunately for the writer of these bitter meditations, his current fiction has proved more promising than his past careers...
FICTION: The Engineer of Human Souls, Josef Skvorecky ∙ Imaginary Magnitude, Stanislaw Lem Machine Dreams, Jayne Anne Phillips ∙ Something Out There, Nadine Gordimer ∙ Tough Guys Don't Dance, Norman Mailer ∙ A Weed for Burning, Conrad Detrez...