NIGHTMARE
ONE, by David Karp; Victor Gollancz, English price 12/6. HIS is quite a well-told yarn about the destruction of a personality by | the State, somewhere, sometime. It is advertised on the cover as worthy of comparison with Darkness at Noon and 1984; but though comparison is invited it is a much less impressive book. The explanation is simple. The College professor, bearing the "taint of individuality" where such things are no longer permitted, does so only on the author’s say-so. He is never. made real, so that there is little to destroy. The beginnings, his wife and family, his work at College, are naive in the extreme. It is a pity that the author carries so little conviction in terms of feeling, because he can write about ideas. The best chapters, on what can only be termed an inquisition, are beautifully done. But it is a sad commentary on our times that the clever dialogue owes so much to actual inquisitions, on both sides of the Iron Curtain. A’ Yahoo nightmare begins to bear the marks of realism, as background to the daily news. : "There’s nothing as something as one .. ." says the American poet, E. E. Cummings, who understands and
loves the individual better than David Karp does. Karp has the correlative: nothing can destroy one more skilfully than the monolithic state.
Anton
Vogt
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 788, 27 August 1954, Page 14
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225NIGHTMARE New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 788, 27 August 1954, Page 14
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