EXILE

by Peter Weiss ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 28, 1968

The author of Marat/Sade and The Investigation continues his autobiographical foray into the jungle of self begun in The Leavetaking (Harcourt, Brace & World--1962). In fact the earlier material is incorporated here introducing the protagonist's move to the ""vanishing point"" of retreat--prelude to freedom. The early exile (from his garden world as a child) recurs again and again as the growing consciousness, the groping psyche, carefully withdraw from encroaching externals. Parents are structured into the machinery of middle class existence; schoolmates torture the child because, he finally discovers, he is half-Jewish; the times of battles, murdered contemporaries and marching armies threaten the core while the narrator contemplates his writing, his paintings. Moving thoughtlessly away from the horrors of World War II, the refugee moves through England, Czechoslovakia, Stockholm. Exiled friends find their own destructive solutions; a wife--once desired--offers no homeland. Leaving his two-year-old child with his mother (""a dark transaction"") the narrator journeys to Paris where in the babble of tongues he strives to find a speech. And at last, in anonymity, a man of no country finds his own natural language ""in which I could give everything a name"" and absolute freedom. An ""exhausted European,"" a contemporary man sheds a skin. The pampered prose often smothers like heavy fur but has a sheen, and the book is deep, dark, demanding.

Pub Date: June 28, 1968

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Delacorte

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1968

Categories: FICTION