Volume 27, Number 6 · April 17, 1980
The Great Game
By Michael Wood
A Night of Serious Drinking
by René Daumal, translated by David Coward, by E.A. Lovatt
Shambhala, 121 pp., $8.95
René Daumal, aged four or a little older, having just learned to read, is supposed to have asked his sister what a dictionary was. She told him it allowed one to know the meaning of words, and Daumal, in high excitement, ran off to tell his mother, shouting, 'Then I'm saved, I'm saved.' The story is no doubt too pointed to be entirely true, but it does suggest a major preoccupation in Daumal's brief life: the charms and limits of language, the promises it can and cannot keep.
Review, 3209 words
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