Word: sylva
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...Sylva, by Vercors. In a clever reworking of the woman-into-fox fable, French Novelist Vercors investigates the nature of man and man's will in a way that is moralistic but never sententious...
Sugar-Coated Pill. Vercors counterpoises Sylva's struggle upward with the sordid decline of Richwick's sometime girl friend into a drug-addicted, sexually perverted mindlessness. After a dash of degradation with her in London, Richwick escapes to come back home as a love-smitten Pygmalion to his Galatea-who turns out to be pregnant...
...unborn offspring his? Will it even be human? The answers supply some neat fillips at book's end, but they are only part of the literary sugar-coating on Vercors' pill. For pill it is, Vercors is not so much a novelist as a moralist, and Sylva is not so much a novel as a fable-an edifying tale designed to explore the question that has been bothering 59-year-old Jean Brüller ever since he took the pen name Vercors and wrote the book that made his reputation: The Silence...
Vercors' writing since the war has probed and worried that question-most notably in the bestselling You Shall Know Them (1953), which, like Sylva, examines man in terms of his relation to animals. The animals in the earlier novel were a species of hominid, subhuman, but capable of breeding with men-which Vercors used, as he uses his fox-lady, to exemplify his belief in the power of the aspiring will to change and transcend the natural, i.e., animal, condition...
...fruitful." Vercors insists. "The yogi working by himself for himself is a dead end. In my book, the forms and standards of society are represented by Richwick-that's why he may seem something of a prig. But it is these very forms, personified in Richwick, that give Sylva a direction and pattern for her development. And in dedicating himself to her, he too is elevated...