THE REVOLUTIONARY

by Hans Koningsberger ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 20, 1967

The revolutionary is as anonymous, archetypical as his name, reduced to the letter A. Equally nameless is the city and country in which he exists (exists since he is to some extent the casualty of a kind of stasis--he broods rather than acts) as a student as a member of a Radical Party committee, fighting the ""great invisible war."" Koningsberger's novel, very different from anything he has ever done, projects the dialectics of the revolutionary, any revolutionary, in which ideas dominate actions: A. becomes disaffected and leaves the Committee, is suspended from the university, is abandoned by Anne (his mistress--a purely physical thing), enters the Army and leaves it, goes into hiding (via Helen--from the material world he repudiates), and is left to ""externalize"" his propaganda by throwing a bomb. Like Hamlet, he's ""not afraid from lack of thought but from too much""; inevitably, his doubt and diffidence--handled in a deliberately monochromatic fashion--lend themselves to interpretation rather than involvement.

Pub Date: Sept. 20, 1967

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1967

Categories: FICTION