THE HERMIT

by Eugene Ionesco ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 1, 1974

Ionesco makes an easy metamorphosis from absurdist playwright to anti-novelist of the psychological underground, meshing introspection and dream in the story of a nameless petit bourgeois whose inheritance from a rich American uncle buys his freedom from the small prison of menial office work to the larger prison of detached idleness and anguished boredom relieved only by brandy and Beaujolais. Time dissolves in his ruminations on the nature of the universe and the human condition. A Rhinoceroslike revolution triggers his realization that the state of catastrophe outside is a reflection of the diseased condition of his own soul. Reality and personality become indefinitely intertwined (""All was lost. Wasn't everything lost? My feeling was that all was lost."") and ""the burden of the unknowable"" shifts from narrator to reader. The revolutionaries, it turns out, are reactionaries, one side backed by the Lapps, the other by the Turks. A messenger wearing a derby hat, spats and a mustache arrives to announce: ""We're in a prison to be sure, but the prison is large and beautiful. . ."" After his burst of enthusiasm for humanity is dampened by a bullet through his hat, the hermit barricades himself in his apartment -- with a good deal of wine, to be sure -- to wait out the fighting. Eventless years, possibly generations, pass before his only good dream comes true in a luminous but slightly banal vision of paradise: a garden with flowering trees, columns, a triumphal arch and a silver ladder leading to heaven. Such is the quality of Ionesco's state of grace -- hard-won, private, unreal totally impossible by any conventional standard, and purposeless to boot. His only alternative to fear and trembling is ironic but the deus ex machina always turns up. And the mercurial playfulness charms once again.

Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1974

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1974

Categories: FICTION