Volume 4, Number 10 · June 17, 1965
The Old Amalaki
By Frank Kermode
Ramakrishna and His Disciples
by Christopher Isherwood
Simon & Schuster, 348 pp., $7.50
'I must say, you make the whole thing sound crashingly dull.' This is what the dissolute Paul says to Christopher in Down There on a Visit, in response to the latter's attempt to explain Vedantist techniques of meditation. In the end Paul properly launched in holiness by the guru Parr, turns out to be something of a saint, a very camp saint admittedly, but an Isherwood holy man needs to be so. Until Susan Sontag wrote about it in Partisan Review, the standard treatment of camp was the analysis in The World in the Evening, and one foresaw in this new book a final apotheosis of camp; but it turns out after all to be crashingly dull.
Review, 2017 words
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