The quote below comes from a 1967 essay by critic Raymond Durgnat about Le Sang de Bêtes [literally, the blood of beasts], a documentary about a slaughterhouse in Paris. And if that's not removed enough for you, I've neither seen the movie nor read the essay in its entirety, but cribbed the quote from p. 252 of Jonathan Coe's The Winshaw Legacy: or What a Carve Up!
It's a reminder that what is inevitable may also be spiritually unendurable, that what is justifiable may be atrocious ... that, like our Mad Mother Nature, our Mad Father Society is an organization of deaths as well as of lives ...
2 comments:
I'm in a somewhat isolated cabin, and for some reason, Coe's book is one of the few books available to me. I can't work up any enthusiasm, though. Would you recommend? (I've read Rotter's Club, which was pretty good.)
Not really. It was sort of fun, but it didn't really satisfy, either as political satire (sympathetic as I was, I found it sometimes shrill, which is probably a common fault of satire that's too extended) or as gothic entertainment. It was surprisingly engrossing, nonetheless, but if I were locked away in an isolated cabin in dark woods with a serial murderer on the loose in the night ... I'd look at what else was on the shelf.
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