Customer Reviews

The Witness (Masks)

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There are several books to which this one may be compared. I do not know which comparison will resound usefully for readers of this review but such framing may help clarify the nature of The Witness. It resembles in its adventures at sea and semiotic ambages, Eco's The Island of the Day Before. It obliquely resembles in its conclusion, some of the theatrical circumstances of Unsworth's Morality Play. In its approach to a group of people encountered by Europeans, it resembles writings of Levi-Strauss, or anthropologists and mythographers of his ilk. These comparisons may not entirely indicate the quality of description in many sections of this book, nor the entrancing tale told by a young man whose voice testifies to his survival for some time as an outsider in a most curious and vibrant new world culture. The book has sexy parts and bucolic parts, character-driven excitements and pleasing resolutions to momentarily intractable mires, cannibalism and monasticism. On the whole it is a fabulously enchanting and improbable survivor's tale anachronistically enriched by wanderings in some of the many-mirrored halls of late twentieth century, French intellectualism.

I have little doubt that by writing this book Saer meant the humanity as a whole. This is what we are - reduced to bare essentials - we are still cannibalizing each other and our own selves and then engage in our daily business as if nothing happened. This is us: chaos on the brink of order and order on the bring of chaos and turmoil. And our civilization is, in essence, our ability to somehow manage by vascillating between these two extremes.