Word: saint
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Like Samuel Butler's Erewhon, Thomas Berger's principality of Saint Sebastian can be found on no map, but its significance will be clear to any reader with a sufficiently jaundiced eye. Tucked away in Middle Europe, somewhere between Johann Strauss's Vienna and Kafka's Prague, the country subsists on a precarious economy of universal credit. Politics and journalism are against the law; pederasty is condoned, but rudeness is considered a crime against the state. The government bureaucracy includes the absurdly named Ministry of Clams, a sort of dead-letter office for all insoluble problems, whose minister believes that...
...cheat and dissemble: spying should be just your meat." Wren goes off to more of a welcome than he bargains for from Olga, the Amazonian ringleader of the Liberation Front, and less help than he needs from Clyde McCoy, American drunk and pornographer, the Firm's resident operative in Saint Sebastian...
...always, is polished, but some vital tension is missing from Nowhere. The author's style of fastidious disdain -- half repelled, half fascinated -- seems to need a setting of solid, preferably seamy realism, like Reinhart's tacky heartland or Neighbors' fringe suburbia. Free floating over the fantastic topography of Saint Sebastian, he tends to lose his sting. Moreover, between streaks of zaniness, Berger allows Wren to lapse into his old college lecturing habits. Underlining a point about Saint Sebastian's preposterousness that would be best left implicit, Wren asks, "Did things make any more sense elsewhere? Or, to be fair...
...more congenially savage mode, incorporating an authentic urban snarl into his impeccable diction. His hapless narrator enjoys perfect security by disguising himself as a wino ("That there is no effective form of defense against a derelict is an irreducible truth of city life"). Even the deposed Prince of Saint Sebastian hustles a string of personal appearances, with the Firm as his agent. But these passages make up a mere fraction of the book. As for the rest, one can only agree with a neighborhood hooker who unburdens herself to Wren after he escapes a bomb planted in his apartment...
Pritchett's best-known novel is "Mr. Beluncle," first published in 1951, and his famous short stories include "The Fly in the Ointment," and "The Saint...