Word: dh
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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FARAWAY (245 pp.)-André Dhôtel- Simon & Schuster...
...country there are really several worlds," says Author André Dhôtel at the outset of this wistful, wonderfully comic tale. His young hero, Gaspard Fontarelle, is born to a resolutely matter-of-fact world, the sleepy, stodgy French resort village of Lominval. But all about Lominval, as the young boy grows up, is the dark, beckoning world of the Ardennes forest. And Gaspard himself is marked from birth as another-worldling. At his christening, thunder rumbles in the distance, and a panicked cat scratches the notary's wife. Calamities hound the sweet, shy child-a deer hunter...
...because this is a spoof of the strict and stuffy, the step-by-steppers and the serious-takers of life. Author Dhôtel winds up his ramble with the mocking hawker's chant of Gaspard's papa: "Step up here sir; don't be afraid of life. Don't take one tie; don't take ten, take twenty, and have one to your taste every morning of your life! And hear this, hear this, the most necessary and inevitable purchase of all your days, for the picayune supplementary cost of sixty-five francs, this...
...Which," concludes Romancer Dhôtel (in the real world a high-school philosophy teacher) "is the original and only philosophy possible in the territory...
Three years ago a De Havilland DH-110 jet fighter disintegrated and plunged into a crowd, killing 28, but the crowds last week did not seem nervous when almost untested new airplanes flashed a few feet over their heads. Many of the airplanes were supersonic, but much to the crowd's disappointment, they all kept below the speed of sound. Britain's air officialdom has probably decided that the shock waves stirred up by the latest airplanes are too dangerous even for Britain's gluttons-for-punishment public...