During the two decades of her writing life (1941-1960), Anna Blaman was at the cutting edge of literature, renowned for the influence French Existentialism had on her writing and as one of the most sensual writers of her day. At the dawn of a new century her book is best read as a period piece; otherwise it looks rather like a Mills & Boon ‘rose-pink novella’ for intellectuals.


The book’s narrator, Stefan, was an insecure boy of working class origin. Learning that the way to get on in the world is through verbal manipulation, he turned literary journalist as an adult and pirated his wife Stella from the arms of a sugar-daddy. This all turned sour when she left him and six years on Stefan has become a cynical wreck and fretted himself into a threatening heart condition. A typical male chauvinist, he is utterly self-absorbed and convinced of his own rightness. Feminine behaviour he despises, women are little more than sexual objects to him. His last human contact is with Paul, the obliging editor of the paper he works for, and he is even on the point of cutting that when a car crash does it for him. Paul’s wife Marian, with whom Stefan had earlier had an unsatisfactory affair, discovers evidence that he was secretly in love with Stefan and commits suicide. This has a cathartic effect on Stefan and allows him release. Since Stella has found herself another sugar-daddy in the meantime, he incorrigibly jumps into bed with a nurse.


The book is not divided into chapters but proceeds episodically. Each section extends itself through a series of interconnected thoughts, a narration rather than narrative. This introduces us to the many-faceted negativity of the protagonist in the prescribed Existentialist manner. Contemporary male readings of the novel saw it as an enquiry into ‘the age-old question of what, ultimately and essentially, man is’. Half a century on, sensitised by Simone de Beauvoir rather than Sartre, its value is as a devastating exposée of male egotism.

But then he no longer even looked up or round. He started getting undressed, with despondent movements. He dropped his clothes casually on the beach and I watched him, breathless, deeply moved. It was as if in this extinguished world the first man was being reborn, being created in blinding, beautiful nakedness. I saw his neck bending pensively, his young shoulders, smooth-skinned, his legs straight and strong as if he’d be able to push himself off from the earth and jump very high, but didn’t know. At first I was in no way prepared for what was going to happen, but when I saw him walking toward the sea, not guilelessly but dejectedly, and yet with determination, I understood: he was going to swim until his strength failed him. He could no longer bear his loneliness, he didn’t feel like the first man but like the last, in this forgotten world; a forgotten prey. He walked toward the sea, he would swim on and on until his last remaining strength forsook him, until he embodied nothing but surrender, and then the satiated sea would be willing to devour him, if only with listless reluctance.

At that moment I believed I knew why I was still alive, in the same way as I had done in the past, with the same conviction that human life is not governed by crude fate, but that it has a destiny. I suddenty knew quite certainly that he was the reason for my presence on earth; he was the child, the man, the woman, the human being , the symbol of all that love wants to preserve and protect, and if I could save him I would have saved the whole world. (p. 184, tr. Adrienne Dixon)