Word: demaison
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Dates: during 1940-1940
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...NOAH'S ARK - André Demaison - Macmillan...
When André Demaison treats of human beings, he is merely a cultivated, steel-hard French Colonial businessman who seems to be unable to write badly. When he describes a primeval, half-witted stowaway he begins to warm up. When he writes of beasts and birds and reptiles, he is a blend of scientist, sensualist and mystic, but above all he is an exact and subtle artist, at ease in a world entirely his own. Demaison plans a series of volumes - for which his over-all title is La Comedie Animale - to do for the animal world what Balzac tried...
...Noah's Ark is Demaison's account of a voyage he made when he was only 23. He was in command of the small Jouet des Plots, stitching along the west coast of Africa; his business was to buy up wild animals for the circuses, zoos, rich amateurs of Europe. He acquired, among other beasts, a panther, a magnificent, tame, young lion, a buffalo, a young elephant, a hyena, a dwarf hippopotamus, two little sacred pythons whose delight was to weave themselves upon his ankles. The buffalo broke loose in the hold, one of the chimpanzees piteously died...
Night after night, throughout the voyage, a comet increased upon the sky. Without insistence or even comment Demaison invests this comet and, at length, the whole of his narrative, with a strange symbolic radiance. At the end, the comet masked by storm, the ship helmed by a halfwit, he is wrecked. When he comes to, he, the halfwit, a dog, a cat, sit on the sand and gaze into the gashed hull. The beach is one intricate fabric of escaping footprints. The most valuable of the animals were insured; he is glad of their liberty. Into the sack that once...
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