Word: mauriac
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...LOVED AND THE UNLOVED (153 pp.)-François Mauriac-Pellegrini & Cudahy...
...novelist, François Mauriac has two sides: 1) the urbane Frenchman who analyzes love with the detachment of a metaphysician, and 2) the devout Roman Catholic who wrestles with...
...Mauriac's latest novel, The Loved and the Unloved, rehearses his usual themes: human flesh as ineradicable temptation, romantic love as a path to mutual hatred, bourgeois life as a variety of spiritual sloth, and free will as man's great burden ("Our bad actions belong wholly to us"). The book is written in a style that is almost spectacularly gaunt. In tone it resembles a medieval morality play; in shape, a modern dance confined to anguished and angular gestures...
...Mauriac contrasts the fortunes of the two couples. Marie and Gilles, the fortunately average characters, glide happily into marriage. Agathe and Nicolas mentally torture each other until Nicolas blurts out the truth that he has never loved her. Nicolas, shamed, leaves town to look for "somebody." This somebody, hints Mauriac...
...didactic intent, Novelist Mauriac writes no tracts; he is too impressed by the complexity of human behavior to believe that it can be presented in terms of any pat system. Mauriac's world is neither spacious nor brilliant, but it has something of the strong austerity of good Romanesque...