Word: unrealities
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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From the beginning, everything seems unreal. We meet the most important characters on a small freighter bound for Port-au-Prince from New York. But instead of escaping into fantasy, we are immersed in one of those old movies about a group of wildly disparate travelers locked together in a tight situation. For the people are plausible only as creations of a novelist at the end of his rope, searching for something to add zest to his book. A 1948 Presidential candidate on the Vegetarian ticket and his stiff-upper-lipped wife; a mysterious adventurer, escaping from Philadelphia; a Negro...
...unreal characters aren't enough to make a book this dull. After all, we do care about the vegetarians enough to cringe mildly for them. And a few of the other characters are interesting, too: the little criminal, who is always making up stories about himself and planning great escapades which invariably fail, or the Haitian doctor, a gentle, philosophical communist. And there's not nearly enough about the narrator's mother, who writes to her Haitian lover: "Marcel, I know I'm an old woman and as you say a bit of an actress. But please go on pretending...
...that Americans should have to seek such assurances. In the postwar years when Western Europe's very life depended on the continuing commitment of U.S. troops and dollars, Washington's credibility was not questioned. Is it when Santa moves on to the next house that he becomes unreal...
...gets a tux, she a couple of evening gowns, and they check into Monte Carlo. The luxury, like the poverty, seems hard: there are the same straight lines, the same stark blacks and whites, set off by the flickers of brocade and jewelry. But the hardness is unreal because it has no effect on the people within it. Jeanne lives only for the game and seems not to care whether she sleeps in the railway waiting room or in the Hotel de Paris. Claude, the son of the watchmaker, is impressed with the falseness of the luxury that existed before...
...world outside the casinos is hard and unreal, the internal gambling life is distorted and uninteresting. Occasionally Jeanne and Claude make self-conscious speeches about why they gamble: because it is exciting, vital, and passionate (winning streaks get musical background). But by making his characters play a roulette of hunches, Demy ignores the great tension in gambling between the desire for rational control and the hope of accidental success. Claude and Jeanne never play a "system;" they win in runs on single numbers, at odds of 36-to-1. "Play 17," he tells her. "Why," she asks...