Revolutions destroy lives, but the lack of revolution can also be devastating. Don Celestino is one such victim. He is an aging Spanish anarchist living in Paris, on a small stipend sent by his uncle. He has two friends, and at the beginning of the book loses them. The rest of the story is Don Celestino’s decline. Chaos and Night shows how Death draws its net around a man, and slowly, almost playfully reels him in. It’s at once terrifying and reassuring. Don Celestino needs death, to answer certain riddles he doesn’t know he’s asking.
Every political man outlives his time. Once he’s adapted to the struggles of the 1930s, it’s already the 1950s, and everything he’s learned is useless. America has lost roughly 5 wars by refighting World War II.
Are we all exiles, living far from our true native land? Or is this only true of anarchist exiles? “A novel is a soggy thing,” E. M. Forster writes in Aspects of the Novel, which I’m now reading. It’s impossible to say what it “means.”
The central relationship in the book is between Don Celestino and his daughter Pascualita, a young woman who yearns to be free but is saddled with this cantankerous egomaniac, her dad (whom she also loves). De Montherlant, the fascist sympathizer, has written an utterly feminist novel — about an anarchist.
Chaos and Night
