A WEED FOR BURNING

by Conrad Detrez ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 31, 1984

My soul had learned everything. It had come to know that God was dead, that revolution crushed the men who made it, that love was impossible. It had paid the highest price in order to depart."" Indeed, the soul of the 28-year-old narrator here departs quite thoroughly--in a dour, autobiographical novel about a young Belgian's journey from seminarian to Brazilian social activist to full-scale revolutionary to tortured prisoner to deportee to political rejectee. Fatherless, the boy is sent to a church-school--where, traumatized by a confessor after the most innocent of erotic interludes with a farmgirl, he is started down the road to the priesthood. In Louvain, at the seminary there, the narrator then meets a Brazillan novice who, a day before taking orders, quits as a religious--an event which shocks and intrigues his friend. And so the narrator soon goes off for a while, to Brazil, to be an independent lay missionary. There, however, while he's working with Catholic union organizers, dramatic personal events come fast and furious. His virginity is lost; he draws close to more radical activists and revolutionaries in Rio (one of whom, Fernando, he falls in love with); he experiences the sexual chaos of Rio's carnival (""In twenty-four hours I had become as profoundly, intimately corrupted as other people became in a lifetime""); he is arrested and tortured after participating in a political kidnapping. So deportation back to Belgium follows, where the narrator will find more doctrinaire political colleagues--who ostracize him for his humane sensibilities (and sexual latitude). Thus, the entire progress of the narrator is actually one of regress and disillusion. And Detrez writes in an expressionistic yet controlled style that lends immediacy to some sections but eventually becomes something of a drone: a pessimistic story of a young life sacrificed to uncongenial ideologies, monotonic yet intermittently powerful.

Pub Date: July 31, 1984

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1984

Categories: FICTION