Word: dutourd
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FIVE A.M. (173 pp.)−Jean Dutourd -Simon & Schuster...
...French mock hero of Five A.M. has a bad case of the hoo-ha's. His creator, Jean Dutourd. 36, is an accomplished satirical duelist (A Dog's Head, The Best Butter) who likes nothing better than to blood his pen on the foibles and pomposities of the French middleclass. He subscribes to the Andre Malraux dictum that France is "saturated with lies," and attacks those lies with what the French call "intellectual rigor." In Five A.M. this verges on intellectual rigor mortis, for Author Dutourd finds and leaves his novel's pathetic protagonist more dead than...
...called An Bon Beurre. In 1950 the Poissonards have 47 million francs, a garish apartment, a country estate, and a son-in-law who is a member of parliament. The shortest distance between these two points is crooked-and savagely funny. French Satirist Jean (A Dog's Head) Dutourd has lampooned not only war profiteers but France itself, a country which has earned more justly than England, the reputation of being "a nation of shopkeepers...
...readers who find the novels of social protest a bore, and U.S. writers who frequently hack the life out of such themes as Dutourd's, The Best Butter is a highly entertaining reminder that in good social criticism, the pin is mightier than the sword...
...opens You Shall Know Them, a pungent new novel by Vercors (real name: Jean Bruller), onetime French Resistance leader and author of the 1944 novel, The Silence of the Sea. Coming as it does only a few months after French Novelist Jean Dutourd's dour little satire, A Dog's Head, in which the human hero was born with the head of a spaniel, it may half persuade U.S. readers that French literature is now steering hell-bent for zoology. But Paranthropus erectus is, in effect, a mere monkey trick to help Author Vercors raise the question: What...