Volume 3, Number 11 · January 14, 1965
Novels from Abroad
By Stanley Kauffmann
Chaos and Night
by Henry de Montherlant
Macmillan, 240 pp., $4.95
The Interrogation
by J.M.G. LeClezio
Atheneum, 243 pp., $4.50
The Woman in the Dunes
by Kobo Abé
Knopf, 241 pp., $4.95
'For years I have been keeping the Spanish Civil War at bay,' Henry de Montherlant wrote in his notebooks in 1938, 'as I know how to keep things at bay. The reason is that I would become too involved…It is more important that I should finish Les Garçons.' Twenty-three years later the subject overcomes him. Having in the interim launched and (he says) finished a preeminent career as a dramatist, he turns in his new novel to the Spanish War, not only with perspective on the past but with the present posed against the past. Well rendered in English by Terence Kilmartin, Chaos and Night is concerned with a relic of the war, a Spanish anarchist, now sixty-seven, who has been exiled in Paris for twenty years. The old anecdote tells us that, when a Frenchman was asked by his grandchild what he had done during the Revolution, he replied, 'I survived.' In effect, Montherlant examines this answer for his hero: to find out what survived and why and whether it was worth the effort.
Review, 1777 words
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