Word: reveles
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WITHOUT MARX OR JESUS by Jean-François Revel. 269 pages. Doubleday...
Jean-François Revel has been described by Mary McCarthy as having a "bullish" aspect, a "broad-browed, head-lowered promise of some intransigent charge into the arena." With critical hoofs stamping and literary horns waggling, what Revel gores is myths. After teaching in Florence, for instance, he wrote a book suggesting, among other heresies, that Italian men are far less virile than popular legend...
...France as a columnist for the weekly L'Express, Revel cast his beady eye upon a more solid target, sacred, large, fixed as a monument: Charles de Gaulle himself. Then Revel had a splendid idea. As a Frenchman in search of the ultimate heresy, why not-sacre bleu! -write a book in praise of the United States...
Without Marx or Jesus is the result. Already a bestseller in France, it promises to be one of those literary causes celebres that Americans like to discuss without necessarily reading. Revel operates from two unprovable premises with a passion for abstract generalization that seems extreme even for a Frenchman. Premise 1: "If mankind is to survive," Revel thunders, the world must have a revolution. Premise 2: Such a revolution can start only...
What redeems the play is what redeems any Osborne play: an intriguing central character who rivets the audience with nothing more than talk, talk and more talk. This time it is the roguish writer, a part that Richardson does not so much perform as revel in -gloriously. Behind his screen of "Who, me?" buffoonery, the writer has plumbed the cold depths of his situation. The other characters-old generation and new-are still in the shallows, still fashionably suffering a loss of faith as if it were a briefcase left on a train. To the writer, the gravest...