Word: gaffeur
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Dates: during 1954-1954
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...Super-Babitch. The Joker in the original French is Le Gaffeur, a fellow who always does the wrong thing. Pierre Javelin lives in a police state called the City, where the sky is never visible and people live in parallelepipeds, geometrical monstrosities housing up to 5,000 families. Pierre is not aware that he has done anything wrong when, arriving home one night, he cannot turn his key in the lock. A giant "with a Russian mustache" is living in the apartment, and Pierre's wife is gone...
...next few days the ashen-faced gaffeur, scarcely eating or sleeping, blunders through a dream world that is Novelist Malaquais' vision of hell. The City sees all, hears all; it exacts silence from its citizens and demands that they draw up reports about each other. Pierre's neighbors don't know him; the telephone company denies he has a telephone; and his wife's office, the National Institute of Applied Idiosyncrasy (motto: Watch Your Step), acts as if she doesn't exist. Before the City is through with him, Pierre also loses...
...Winning Joker. Novelist Malaquais' triumphant joker seems to come from a stacked deck when Pierre, le gaffeur, wins against the overwhelming odds of the City. His prescription, a sardonically simple one, is set forth in an epigraph from Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre...
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