Volume 17, Number 10 · December 16, 1971
Keeping Up with the News
By Roger Sale
Les Guérillères
by Monique Wittig
Viking, 144 pp., $4.95
Three Trapped Tigers
by G. Cabrera Infante
Harper & Row, 487 pp., $8.95
Monique Wittig has been praised by Frank Kermode and Mary McCarthy as something like a brand-new kind of writer, and it begins to seem that some women are enjoying or suffering the fate of blacks a few years ago. In both cases, it is said, we are being forced out of older ways of thinking as a writer tells us the truth from what had hitherto been the other side of silence. Now we may be able to hear what we should have been listening to all along. It may even be that the refusal of Wittig's Les Guérillères to act like much of a novel at all will be taken as a sign of its newness and originality. The book is about a time when women live as guerrillas, by themselves, fighting men, seeking a new age; its techniques are mostly impersonal and their aim is to achieve something like epic distance and grandeur. But though the idea of such a book may well raise high hopes in at least some readers, the book itself turns out to be, sadly, oddly, at times almost maddeningly, quite dull.
Review, 3659 words
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