Marshlands and Prometheus Misbound
by .New Directions, $3.00.
Two of Gide’s early satirical farces translated into English for the first time by George D. Painter. In Prometheus Misbound, Gide brings together, in a Paris café, Prometheus, Cocles, and Damocles. A passer-by, The Miglionaire, whose real name is Zeus, sets in motion a chain of events in which Gide recasts and intertwines the myths represented by his characters to produce an intricate farce which deals, subtly and seriously, with free will and self-realization.
The absurd narrator of Marshlands is a pretentious aesthete whose life is totally pointless and stagnant. He busies himself making grotesque lists of things to do; he frequents a lady who passes for being his mistress but to whom he does not make love; and he insistently exhorts his acquaintances to act, travel, be adventurous. His invariable justification for his own inert existence is “I am writing Marshlands.” In no other book of Gide’s is his sense of humor so continuously at work; and in its mocking ironies there is more than a hint of self-mockery. Marshlands has aptly been described as one of the gayest novels of boredom that have ever been written.