Volume 9, Number 12 · January 4, 1968
No Man's Land
By D.A.N. Jones
The Revolutionary
by Hans Koningsberger
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 212 pp., $4.95
The Worldwide Machine
by Paolo Volponi, translated by Belén Severeid
Grossman, 213 pp., $6.00
No Man's Time
by V.S. Yanovsky, translated by Isabella Levitin, translated by Roger Nyle Parris, with a Foreword by W.H. Auden
Dutton, 224 pp., $5.00
An anonymous man, an alienated outsider smugly aware of his difference from others, walks his lonely way through an imaginary or allegorical nation-state, discussing abstract ideas according to the metaphysical philosophy studied in the universities of the European continent. A first glance at these three novels suggests, wrongly, that all will be equally depressing. The reader may be reminded of the English play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, wondering irritably whether he is meant to work out the meaning of this metaphysical badinage or whether it is intended to be without significance, in order to illustrate the author's conception of the meaninglessness of human life. Here is the man called A., the principal character in The Revolutionary, by the Dutchman, Hans Koningsberger:
Review, 2353 words
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