Word: detrez
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Dates: during 1984-1984
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...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...
Before he turned to this semiautobiographical novel, Detrez published two fragmentary accounts of his pious Catholic boyhood and a pamphlet defending guerrilla warfare titled For the Liberation of Brazil. Out of this unpromising welter of religious and political rhetoric there has emerged the wholly unsuspected, a writer of genuine promise...
...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 of dancers that rolled...
...decades, the landscape of subtropical disillusion has been so identified with one writer that it is commonly referred to as Greeneland. But Graham Greene's burnt-out cases are rapidly being replaced by Latin American protagonists and European figures who have a fresher story to tell. Detrez is still an unfinished writer, and he lacks the craft and polish of his great predecessor. But he has a sense of the appropriate image and the right valedictory tone...
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...