THE TOWER STRUCK BY LIGHTNING

by Fernando Arrabal ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 12, 1988

Less ponderous than The Compass Stone (1987), but densely demanding, the Spanish-born avant-gardist's new novel takes place during the course of a final world-championship chess match in Paris. While the play proceeds, move by move (complete with chessboard diagrams), we enter the minds of the rival superstars--as they muse upon their bizarre life-histories (in fragmentary flashbacks), their clashing socio-political philosophies, and their fantasies about each other. Elias Tarsis, from Spain, represents the power of seething emotion and serene disorder (à la Bobby Fischer). Orphaned in early childhood, the young Elias vents his anger by torturing an obese classmate. He grows up to become a jeweler's apprentice, a sex-besotted frequenter of brothels, an obsessively jealous lover/pimp; then he repents, joins the Jesuits, has visions, works as a factory chaplain, but is bedeviled and defrocked by lust. So, after being seized and sent to a work camp by Spanish proto-Fascists, Tarsis winds up in a blissful ""triangular idyll"" of ""sensual frenzy"" with two mistresses--until both are killed in a terrorist train-bombing. And Tarsis comes to the championship chess-match as an avenging angel--because he believes (quite rightly) that his adversary is responsible for that terrorist bombing. . .and for the recent Paris kidnapping of the Soviet foreign minister! Tarsis' opponent, you see, is icy, robot-like Swiss physicist Marc Amary, whose story makes Tarsis' seem commonplace. Abandoned by his father, warped by an insane mother, Amary is more or less psychotic--harboring multiple personalities, committing matricide (via tetanus bacteria). Incapable of normal human interaction, he becomes fixated instead on intellectual mastery--of physics, chess, genetic engineering, and Marxist-Leninist political intrigue: he secretly manipulates a terrorist splinter group--and plans to reveal his Marxist self once he has won the championship, thus proving the ""intellectual supremacy of Communism."" The contrived, juxtaposed life-stories here--embracing all sorts of equally repellentisms--are annoyingly schematic, even for a novel that's unabashed in its cartoonish unreality. (A lame twist-ending--after Tarsis thwarts Amary's plans--compounds the problem.) The knotty elaborations at every turn--the labored multiple-personality asides, the acronym-heavy politics--can be enervating. But readers sympathetic to Arrabal's deep, mordant, across-the-board cynicism (all ideologies are reduced to bloodthirsty psychopathology) may find this fitfully, scabrously diverting--with an added smidgin of appeal to chess fans.

Pub Date: July 12, 1988

ISBN: 0140130217

Page Count: -

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1988

Categories: FICTION