Word: paperback
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, if distributed at home and abroad, could be an effective weapon for us. The publisher's price [$5] will prevent many from buying it. The solution is a subsidized paperback 50? edition with worldwide, free foreign-language copies. Since the U.S.S.R. holds and refuses payment of royalties owed American authors whose works have been published in Russia, the Pasternak royalties could be distributed among these unpaid American authors and credited to the balances owed them by the Russians...
...VOYEUR, by Alain Robbe-Grillet (219 pp.; Grove; clothbound, $3.50; paperback, $1.75), is based on the author's notion that "the world is neither significant nor absurd. It is. That is the most remarkable thing about it." Proceeding from this Istentialist view, Author Robbe-Grillet, hero of Europe's avant-garde critics, has written a sort of whodunit in which the question of whodunit is never answered. To a French offshore island comes Mathias, a watch salesman. Little is told about him, but it is soon plain that he is close to insanity and that his special aberration...
...UNNAMABLE, by Samuel Beckett (179 pp.; Grove; clothbound, $3.50; paperback, $1.45), carries the blob hero to his logical conclusion: "complete disintegration." Mahood, the hero-victim of The Unnamable, who early in the book dubs himself Worm, never leaves a large jar. It stands on a pedestal in a street presumably in Paris, just outside a chophouse. He is without arms and legs, and a collar fastened to the lip of the jar fits under his jaw so that he cannot move his head. The restaurant owner's wife changes the sawdust in the jar now and then, feeds...
Just because we have no older classics, no Dante or Moliere, is no reason to leave American literature to the West Coast and the paperback racks...
...Sahl legend continues to grow. Often mercilessly abusive ("I see where J. Edgar Hoover has written a book. I think it's called How to Turn In Your Friends to the FBI for Fun and Profit"), sometimes sharply on target ("The reissue title of this paperback book is Here Is My Flesh, which originally appeared as An Introduction to Accounting"), Sahl flays both political left and right, freewheels through a labyrinth of rambling asides to his punch lines...