BEASTS AND MEN

by Pierre Gascar ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 18, 1956

From France, where Gascar was awarded the Prix Femina and the Prix Goncourt, this collection of short stories is symbolical in intent, sombre to savage in tone, and unsparing in its view of an animal world -- cunning- ruthless- rabid-which confronts man and reflects him. In the frenzied stampede of The Horses, Peer, who could gentle them, finds a release for his own anger; a search for the giant rat, known as Gaston, through the sewers of a city presages the ""gnawing destruction"" of an invasion to come; a bridal couple spend their first night in a rented room- along with a malignant cat; a boy's apprenticeship in a butcher shop is a dark ordeal; and there is the bleak graveyard in The Season of the Dead, a concentration camp during the war, with its vitiation of souls as well as bodies.... The feral threat of cat and rat and dog and horse, the reversion of man to the secondary state of primitive impulses, these form a powerful projection- imaginative, desolate. Limited.

Pub Date: June 18, 1956

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Little, Brown-A.M.P.

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1956

Categories: FICTION