cover image To End of World

To End of World

Blaise Cendrars, Blaise Ccendrars. Dufour Editions, $32 (0pp) ISBN 978-0-7206-0819-9

In Therese Eglantine, Cendrars (1887-1961), the cubist poet and echt modernist, created a character reflecting the need in ``our day and age Paris, late '40s for precision, for speed, for energy, for fragmentation in time and diffusion in space.'' Therese, however, is no nubile bohemian but a 79-year-old actress who likes to be beaten, a Parisian sparrow gone to seed. She is the star both of a play--perhaps, speculates Crosland, Giraudoux's The Mad woman of Chaillot --and of a subterranean galaxy of ex-legionnaires, theater people, black marketeers and freaks. Although Cendrars complained about difficulties with the plot, there really isn't any, just events juxtaposed to show Therese as mistress of the improbable: her prolix self-defense in the face of a possible murder charge; her fascination with a legless woman, the Presidente , and a violent man, Jeannot. Cendrars's sharp humor (``They're aerophagous, and you can smell it on their breath'') is the high point of a book which is perhaps not as compellingly manic as Dan Yack . It should also be noted that, even without the first dozen pages (in which Cendrars portrays the gamut of sexual, sanguinary and excretory activities), this novel is not for everyone. (July)