Word: vost
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...passion that has increasingly dominated Hawkes' recent books (The Blood Oranges, Travesty) is sex; The Passion Artist, his eighth novel, dwells still more obsessively on this subject. The title begins in irony. Konrad Vost is neither passionate nor an artist but rather an epitome of timid rationality. Hawkes stresses his hero's stylized anonymity, his "small perfectly round gold-rimmed spectacles, his two ill-fitting suits of black serge, his black turtleneck shirts, his pointed shoes that were always worn at the heels and covered with a faint dusting of powdered concrete from the walls of unfinished buildings...
...Kafkaesque. But Vost's prissy, virginal middle age is soon disrupted. He accidentally learns that his daughter is a prostitute; catatonically, he submits to the ministrations of one of Mirabelle's schoolmates before going off to report his daughter to the police. When the women of La Violaine stage a revolt, Vost is among the volunteers who enter the prison, armed with long sticks, and try to beat the women into submission. They fail, and Vost embarks on a nightmare journey over the terrain of lust...
...French von Braun" for his invention of the guided SSII missile, he masterminded both Petit-Clamart and an earlier attempt in which a napalm and plastique bomb was planted on the route to Colombey. De Gaulle commuted the death sentences of two other Petit-Clamart conspirators, Jacques Prévost and Alain Bougrenet de la Tocnaye. But he refused to grant clemency to Bastien-Thiry, reportedly because the attempt had been made when Mme. de Gaulle was also in the car. He was executed by a firing squad March...