The Reader Critic
A Chicago Reader:
I don’t like what The Little Review or any one else I have read says about Sanine. Too analytic, too professional.... Whatever all the worthies say about the book being dangerous, it will not affect any soul a jot if he is not already afflicted.
What I can say is very inferior critically—only a hurried resume of images after I had finished:
A garden like a dull green cloud descended to earth, twilight skies with supple moving figures, gardens kaleidoscopic, hills covered with woods, odors of leaves and grasses, a dark abandoned slimy wolf cavern of counterfeiters, dew-laden grass, shadows, dusk, whispers, eyes in the gloom, skies pale green with faint silver stars and dark birds, night fluttering bats, gardens filled with the melody of nightingales, a little dying frog, lush river banks with wet reeds bending, mysterious wood nymph smiles, mystic rays of sunlight illuminating frail flowers, crimson morning-starred heavens, woods and streams with lithe shining bodies of humans transformed into nymphs and satyrs—a storm that almost breathes of the one in the Pastoral Symphony and Sanine in a flash of lightning is revealed apostrophizing it.
It hurts and one shrinks into one’s skeleton to think that perhaps a setting is obviously made in order to be to the spirit of voluptuous indulgence. But that feeling goes, because it is the objective thing after all—the colors and odors and atmosphere remain.