Word: medusa
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...RAFT OF THE MEDUSA by Vercors. Translated by Audrey Foote. 185 pages. McCall...
...Raft of the Medusa* is set up as a consulting-room thriller and develops the solution to a psychiatric puzzle: Why does a young Frenchwoman who says she is happily married keep flirting with an O.D. of Veronal? Her analyst suspects she has borrowed trouble from her husband, a French poet-novelist whose stock in trade is glamorous rebellion. Called in for consultation, the husband really wants to level, but beneath the lacquer of glory he can perceive only one small flaw in himself: "Despite the success of my books, I have no confidence." Through that tiny portal of awareness...
...title is taken from a Gericault painting that depicts with romantic overkill the pain and bestiality of a raftful of men and women who, in 1816, survived the wreck of the French ship Medusa off Africa, floating for 16 days without rescue. Their actions came to symbolize the voracious selfishness of 19th century bourgeois society...
...Medusa as Trap. Like most 19th century Romantics, he was fascinated by the image of Medusa, the mythical woman whose hair is snakes and whose face turns people to stone. When he saw a painting of Medusa in Florence he called it "the head of a Madonna created by purgatory." He made a paper-cutout version of the Medusa's head, and pasted it onto a page in conjunction with a printed view of the Castel Sant' Angelo in Rome...
...request for equal time comes from Emma Wallop, a small-town Midwestern widow and retired nurse who wakes one day to discover that her former boarder, Randy Rivers, has published a bestselling novel entitled Don't Look Now, Medusa. A tin-plated Spoon River Anthology, it has as its main character a small-town Midwestern landlady, like Emma herself, given to dislocated clichés and malapropisms...