Word: garnetts
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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What happens to a fox become woman is the substance of this evocative new book by the French novelist who calls himself Vercors. The author frankly admits his device is a reverse switch on the metamorphosis m David Garnett's Lady Into Fox, one of the most popular English novels of the '20s in which a young husband finds his wife transformed into a small red fox ("He saw at once that his wife was looking at him from the animal's eyes...
Death & Laughter. Vercors' fox-woman, whom her new protector calls Sylva from the Latin word for forest (Garnett's changeling lady was named Silvia), has the pretty figure of a lithe and leggy 18-year-old with brilliant onyx eyes and, of course, red hair, but inside she is all fox. Richwick learns this the hard way. Sylva sleeps under the bed, curled up in a vulpine ball; she refuses to wear a stitch of clothes, and she smells so strong that her room must be cleaned and thoroughly aired each day. She bolts down whole chickens, crunching...
Romance, in high-fashion terminology, means marabou feathers and encrusted chiffon, sumptuous embroidery and lacy swansdown, and involves moonlight only as an adjective for blue and roses only if they bloom on fabrics instead of bushes. Fur and crocheted collars are conspicuous, as are capes: Eleanora Garnett smocks them for daytime, Fontana cuts them in satin and velvet for evening, Faraoni makes sleeves of them for narrow dresses. Romantic, richly worked evening gowns slink to floor length, Gattinoni's narrow satin gowns come with heavily beaded apron fronts, and Top Designer Micol Fontana offers a blue velvet ball gown...
Love for the "ultimate reality" is even harder to come by. Such abstractions, Garnett points out, are at best concerned only with what God means to humans-not what humans mean to God. And hu mans need the love that is agape, not eros-"concerned not merely with what the other means to us but with what we, in our lives, may mean to the other, whether he has joy in us, or sorrow, whether we serve him or disappoint...
...theology is to be relevant to modern man's predicament, says Garnett, "it must reject the 'atheism' of a 'God' who is hidden beyond man's concrete thought in an immutable eternity impervious to man's tears . . . And it must proclaim by faith a personal God whose life and love and grief are not to be understood as mere symbols that describe nothing in the nature of the ultimate Being itself...