Word: vailland
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...revenue, partly out of simple desire, both industrialists decided to seduce the lady. She agreeably went off to America with one of them, came back with her virginity intact. Then she convinced the other man that she loved him, provoked him into a ruinous financial scheme, deserted him. Novelist Vailland. a sometime Communist who died in May, was also a successful journalist and film scenarist (Les Liaisons Dangereuses). His prizewin-nine novel, The Law, was a compelling study of greed, lust and power politics in a small Italian town. In his present book he aims to tell the ironic, chilling...
...talents go at it as if the idea were spanking-new. Director René Clèment (Forbidden Games) mounts several taut scenes, especially one in which passengers aboard a crowded train seize a Gestapo agent and fling him onto the rails. Fortunately, too, the dialogue by Novelist Roger Vailland neatly sidesteps heroics. "The war doesn't interest me," drawls Signoret, whose husband is safely lodged in a P.W. camp...
TURN OF THE WHEEL, by Roger Vailland (179 pp.; Knopf; $3.50). Milan, an interior decorator, and his wife Roberte, come from Paris to live in the country, squabble, drink, and toss hard truths at one another like bottles of vitriol. Why? Because, says Milan, "two lovers who love one another passionately can only detest each other, as the drunk detests liquor, the addict dope, the gambler cards, and the invert homosexuals." Héléne, a nubile village schoolteacher, is fascinated by the couple's rantings about their free-loving and free-hating past. "Take...
...real rendezvous is with the calendar. He is interesting because he is dated in ways that link him with Hemingway's generation of writers-Malraux, Koestler and Vailland himself. The Hemingway hero is a romantic, but he prides himself on being a guardian of fact, a realistic reporter. Says Duc: "I try not to make things up." He thinks of life as a campaign in which he has won certain medals, all of which he insists on explaining. Duc has been decorated for being in and out of Communism (like Author Vailland), in the French underground...
Malraux finally recognized the limits of the cult of experience when he defined the writer's task as that of "converting as wide a range of experience as possible into conscious thought." With Hemingway himself, and disciples such as Vailland, the young man's quest has become the old man's folly of endlessly pursuing experience for the mere sake of experience...