Word: huxley
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Loosely based on a celebrated case in 17th century France (which Aldous Huxley skillfully described ten years ago in his historical narrative. The Devils of Loudun), this picture, set and filmed in Poland, is already celebrated throughout Europe and last year won a prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Its writerdirector, Jerzy Kawalerowicz, is being compared with Sweden's Ingmar Bergman. In Poland, the Communist press hailed Joan of the Angels? with expectable enthusiasm, while a Roman Catholic prelate called it "a dirty glove thrown in the face of the church." It is, more exactly, a nearly successful work...
...Island, Huxley...
Nowhere & Serutan. The best parts of Pala-and reading about Pala-constitute an intellectual teaser in the best Huvley tradition. It is when Huxley is undertaking to describe the spiritual Himalayas of his fictional Utopias that his prose, always as smooth as yak butter, begins to smell like the same spread. To cut some of the butter, Huxley even provides a snake in his paradise, a local fascist princeling who advocates things like fast cars, Progress, Values, Oil and True Spirituality. In the end, he manages to organize a revolution against Pala's benevolent philosopher rulers, and "the work...
...even Huxley seems to realize, not so much that human perfection is unobtainable, but that it is not interesting. For Utopias are about nowhere and novels are about somewhere; therefore, a Utopian novel is a contradiction in terms...
...Huxley's Pala is at least as explorable as Herman Melville's Typee and more believable than Samuel Butler's Erewhon. But a novelist who writes about erewhon goes against his Serutan. which, as all the world knows, is nature's spelled backwards. Pie in the sky, however deep dish. is never as fascinating as the hard crust of the satirist...