Word: tanguy
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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After jumping over the wall in the narrowest of escapes, Tanguy and his odyssey of torment moved from darkness into light. He was enrolled in a Jesuit school for the children of Andalusian peasants...
Orphanage by Dickens. Peace brought no peace to Tanguy. He went back to Spain, but found no trace of his mother. He was sent to an orphans' and delinquents' home that might have been imagined by Dickens. It was run by sadistically inclined lay brothers. Tanguy took his beatings without a whimper: he "had exhausted his capacity for crying, just as he had drained away his reservoir of hope...
...school's founder Tanguy found a substitute for the loving father he had never known: Father Pardo "was not a saint in the strict sense. But he was a real man, which is almost as rare...
What Now? At 19 Tanguy still cherished the image of a kind of prodigal son's return. But when he finally found his father in Paris, the boy was coldly rebuffed. Tanguy's mother, who also turned up in Paris, had equally little use for him. She was still a left-winger, lost in the intellectual Minotaur's cave of the '30s. At novel's end, with a wistful touch of Chaplinesque pathos, the 25-year-old Del Castillo, currently living in Paris, asks, "What is to become of Tanguy now?" and offers the shadow...
...artlessness with which Author del Castillo achieves a child's angle of vision makes his boy-hero Tanguy one of the most endearing and poignant figures in recent fiction. Child of Our Time is both a grim and a grand commentary on the human condition. The first response to this book is elemental-to weep. The second response is to marvel that Michel del Castillo endured what he did, and that, having endured, he could still forgive so much that is eternally unforgivable...