From Publishers Weekly
Ferlinghetti, the owner of City Lights bookstore in San Francisco and one of the last of the great beats, has produced a slim novel about "what the brain does to the heart," set in the midst of the student revolution of 1968 in Paris. The brain, here, belongs to a mysterious anarchist banker, Julian Mendes. Julian, who on the surface lives a comfortably bourgeois existence, was born in Portugal and came to political maturity under the dictatorship of Salazar. He belonged to an anarchist group in Portugal, but split from the group due to irreconcilable ideological differences Julian was an incorrigibly individualistic anarchist. He was inducted into the secrets of the banking world by a friend of his father's, who made him the heir of a small fortune when he died. In Paris in 1968 for reasons unexplained, he meets Annie, the heart (and eyes) of the book. An American painter somewhat like Joan Mitchell, Annie has gone from abstract expressionism to some compromise with figurative painting. She is teaching at the Beaux-Arts in the spring of 1968, and her students are caught up in the revolutionary currents. She is intrigued and a bit repulsed by Julian, who talks "left" like her father but dresses "right" like a conventional banker. Finally, Julian reveals the gratuitous act that he has been planning, and Annie agrees to become his accomplice. The story belongs to Annie's painterly eye, through which Paris achieves a very pictorial intensity. Annie herself never seems fully surrendered to the story her inner life, in the end, remains as opaque as Julian's act. What will remain with the reader is the lyric hopefulness of the tale, at this distance a slightly melancholic reminder of the events of that tempestuous year.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Ferlinghetti is best known as a poet ( A Coney Island of the Mind ) and as publisher of City Lights Books. His first novel, Her , a surreal quest for the ideal woman, achieved a small cult following in the Sixties. This short novel is more realistic, treating the love affair of Annie, a young American artist in Paris, and anarchist banker Julien Mendeswith the 1968 student revolt as backdrop. Primarily a novel of ideas, more French than American in concept, this book is full of political debate, symbolism, and literary allusions. The love story itself achieves meaning only in relation to larger social concepts such as capitalism, anarchism, and freedom. A lyrical, poetic work that will appeal to a small, though sophisticated, audience. Recommended. William Gargan, Brooklyn Coll. Lib., CUNY
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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