The compass stone. Dieser Artikel ist nicht verfügbar.The compass stone

Arrabal, Fernando. Translated by Andrew Hurley. The Compass Stone. First Edition. New York, Grove Press, 1987. 22 cm. 165 pages. Original hardcover with illustrated dustjacket in Protective covering. Excellent condition first English edition with only very minor signs of external wear. Signed / Inscribed by Fernando Arrabal on the halftitle. In The Compass Stone, his second novel to be published in English, Fernando Arrabal creates a narrative counterpart to his theater of panic, which has won him a reputation as one of the most significant dramatists of our time. The Compass Stone is in the form of a memoir by an unnamed chronicler, a twenty-year-old woman who lives in a greenhouse of a mansion occupied by her crippled father, the Maimed One, and his two grotesque handmaidens, the Sisters. The high walls surrounding the mansion enclose a world unique to Arrabal's imagination, a Boschian allegory world in which guilt, sadism, bodage and murder all fit together to form a surprisingly coherent universe (from the dustjacket). Fernando Arrabal Terán (born August 11, 1932) is a Spanish playwright, screenwriter, film director, novelist and poet. Arrabal was born in Melilla, Spain, but settled in France in 1955; he describes himself as desterrado, or half-expatriate, half-exiled. (Amazon).

This is the dark memoir of a young murderess who shares a mansion with her fatherthe Maimed Onebut lives alone in that part of it she calls the Greenhouse. An incomparable beauty, she more than once entices a man to a homicidal "soiree" at which she slits his throat with a razor while he is in the midst of orgasm. She gives no hint of her reaction to the speculation of S---, an amateur detective whose fascination with the murders provides the novel's only element of suspense. Her own thoughts, invariably in interrogative form, may lead the reader to wonder in turn: Is there no relief from this decadence? L. M. Lewis, Eastern Kentucky Univ., Richmond
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Cast as an accidentally discovered memoir written by a nameless young woman, the Spanish dramatist's newly translated work is more fable and parable than conventional novel. Its 18-year-old narrator/heroine, a kind of beautiful, seductive queen bee, shares a crumbling mansion with her aged father, the "Maimed One," and two women called "The Sisters." She has two principal activities: one is speculation on hierarchies in nature and societya persistent inquiry into the relation of human and insect behavior; the other is the dexterous use of a barber's straight razor, slashing the throats of casual acquaintances just as they reach the throes of sexual rapture. Her few friendsan adoring suma wrestler, a painter with bizarre tastesreveal their own oddities. To pass the time, they plan an orgy featuring paranoics, "depraved couples," sado-masochists and even the notorious Marquis de Sade. The reader never doubts that the speaking voice and questioning mind belong not to the beguiling and terrifying girl but to Arrabal himself. Voice and mind are quirkily interesting, but they are too much given to abstruse, obsessive analogies that inevitably slacken, confuse and, ultimately, vitiate dramatic effect and narrative momentum.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.