Word: palabaud
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...CROSSING, by Jean Reverzy (256 pp.; Pantheon; $3.50). The French eye is quick to see beauty, even quicker to see the fatal corruption that lies beneath. This disquieting first novel by a French physician has such a theme: it tells of Palabaud, who has spent sunlit years in Tahiti and has now come home to the bourgeois grey of France to die of an enormously swollen liver...
...Palabaud has seen the swift ruin of so much beauty that death holds no terror. He remembers how quickly the lovely bronzed Polynesians fade, how at 30 their "faces become shrivelled and deformed . . . and bodies which were formerly shapely either swell or collapse into meagreness." His beautiful Tahitian mistress had come home with him, but in European clothes her soft body loses form and boldness, her sandaled feet seem flat and ugly. Palabaud dies peacefully in a hospital bed, his mind awash with memories of the sea he had always loved. A few shreds of his corpse are sent...
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