THE LAW

by Roger Vailland ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A

A rather forbidding title applies also to a cruel, retaliatory game of chance still played in the Italian port of Manacore, symbolically as well to the game of life in which the whole village participates. Around the loves of its feudal patron, Don Cesare, a man reaching from old age, the author plays off the successive women he has taken and married off to others of his household or holdings and so created a small kingdom. There are many jealousies-of hierarchy, of privilege, of expectations and beyond the overt emotional tensions, there is a mystery. A robbery has occurred; the police evade the issue; half truths prevail; and finally a girl-ostensibly Don Cesare's next victim, plants the evidence which leads to new accusations and finally Don Cesare's death... The Prix Goncourt and very successful in France, it is questionable whether the intricacies of caricature and of implication will attract an American audience. It is a vertical section of a society surviving from an earlier age but the brute instincts of power, money, lust lend their impetus to the narrative, their universality to its intention.

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1958

Categories: FICTION