Word: mauriacs
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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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...
Fallen Creatures. Marie and Gilles are conventional sugar-sticks, but Agathe. straining for a love she cannot possess and Nicolas, moving from his false idolatry of Gilles to a love of God, are remarkably impressive figures, gargoyles of suffering and striving. In telling their story, Novelist Mauriac shows himself still deeply preoccupied with the fevers of the human blood; at 66, he does not pretend to a resignation he apparently cannot feel...