A Weed for Burning
Howard, Dick
In Brief A WEED FOR BURNING, by Conrad Detrez. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $13.95, 258pp. This novel, winner of France's prestigious Prix Renaudot, is the story of a generation. It is a...
...We in the old world of religion, politics, and beauty will continue to read him with a sense of gratitude and recognition...
...Only when confronted with the old Belgium, does the author of Ludo and Les Plumes begin to be liberated...
...it forces them both to think again the new world which is ours...
...DICK HOWARD...
...Detrez's fictions are more than his own story, and more than just their art...
...It is a true story, Detrez's own — a tale of a "sentimental education" through revolution in the church and in the political order...
...Love, beauty, and life remain...
...Conrad Detrez, at the time cultural attache of the French embassy in Managua, died last February at the age of fortyseven...
...But both these fictions seem to have been a preparation, an unraveling of the past, for the emergence of the mature writer in the present volume...
...Detrez's first novel, Ludo, transmuted a child's experience of world war in his native Belgium...
...This first translation (a good one) should not be his last...
...The "destruction" of which Detrez writes is that of the old world and its beliefs...
...There, he sacrifices his old world to physical love and the beauty of the revolution...
...The author's handwritten dedication in my French copy offered me ' 'this story of a destruction...
...and therefore there had to be new novels...
...Imprisoned, tortured, and expelled, he continues to work with the revolutionary organization in Paris where a new revolution surprises him in May 1968...
...The seminarian from the old world seeks refuge in the new, in Brazil...
...A Weed for Burning takes the story from the old to the new world...
...His second, Les Plumes du Coq ("The Rooster's Feathers"), gently narrated the sweet pain of the rebirth of the old world...
...neither politics nor religion needs be their nemesis...
...Love and beauty struggle in the heart of a theology student with a doctrinaire love and beauty from which life has fled...
...That story fused love, life, and the church universal with the silence of beauty and the rude shock of politics...
...His work belongs to the history of the church and that of the revolution...
...Unable to recognize the new, but drawn to it in spite of himself, he is expelled from the party organization to which he had sacrificed himself...
...There is a new world...
Vol. 112 • September 1985 • No. 16
