Word: coline
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...LONDON NOVELS OF COLIN MacINNES (CITY OF SPADES, ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS, MR. LOVE AND JUSTICE). 626 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux...
...Chloe dies, Colin's apartment shrinks into a prison, his records wear out, and to pay for Chloe's treatment he's forced to find work in a munitions factory, where guns are grown with the heat from human bodies...
...novel's end becomes a Kafkaesque surrealism that we find frightening rather than funny. Sartre, who was a real-life friend of Vian's, is amusingly satirized as Jean-Sol Partre, the cult idol who enters packed lecture halls on elephant back, crushing his waiting fans. But when Chick, Colin's friend, sacrifices everything, including his girl-friend Alise, in order to buy Partre's work, the joke turns grisly. Chloe dies from a water-lily growing in her lungs: this is both Vian's preposterous parody of the consumptive heroines who litter romantic tradition, and a real tragedy...
...becomes unforgettable. Vian's language evokes both sensuality and a kind of fragile tenderness; Chloe's skin is "amber-colored and as appetizing as marzipan," but she coughs "like a piece of silk tearing." This delicacy is poignant in the second half of the novel, as Chloe and Colin become the innocent victims of an inexplicable determinism for which no one will take responsibility. At Chloe's grotesque, horrifying funeral, Colin cross-examines Jesus...
...noting to do with me," said Jesus. "Suppose we talk about something else" . . . He tried to make himself more comfortable on his nails. . . . His eyes . . . closed and Colin could hear, coming from his nostrils, a faint purr of satisfaction, like a well...