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PARTISAN REVIEW
which animates the self-sacrifice of his victims, sees their folly as con–
ferring on them a perverse minor triumph. Their entirely material and
curiously sexual passion for Remo reaps for them the spiritual benefit
of being able to continue life on some level meaningful to them when
money and the object of passion are gone. In this sense, and as a study
of the material destruction of those ripe for destruction the novel
is
first-rate.
Technically it is remarkable for the way in which, on occasion, the
careful realism is deliberately violated by the introduction of passages
of grotesquerie which point up in comic horror the monstrousness of the
victor and his victims. The wedding scene, in which the virginal aunts
deck themselves in bridal finery and orange blossoms to attend Remo's
unloved but wealthy American bride to the altar-she thought she was
having a typical Florentine wedding-is a brilliant example of pure Ex–
pressionist fiction. What one had thought
of-Caligari
and a few other
films excepted-as a method which had come to very little, can be as–
tonishingly powerful in the hands of an accomplished writer.
The portrait of Remo, the temperate and calculating prodigal, is
superb. He is one of those non-human beings, more common among
men than among women, who, secure in the possession of great physical
beauty and charm, can flourish without any ties, spiritual or sexual–
a marble faun, a Donatello incapable of assuming humanity. It is pos–
sible to construe him, given the date of
The Sisters Materassi,
as a sly
parable on Fascist youth, though on its surface the novel is set in a po–
litical vacuum into which nothing penetrates but the immediate material
concerns of the characters. His existence is all
Kraft durch Freude,
and
although his important affiliations are with motorcars, in his radiant and
meaningless beauty he reminds one of a figure on a party poster. The
translation is excellent. All the play of light and shade on a subject
which could have been merely banal or merely sorrowful is caught in
Angus Davidson's prose.
LIBERAL PRESS , INC .
printers of
PARTISAN REVIEW
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Ernest Jones
