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26 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Eroticism in the dark, 1 Feb 2002
In a remote hamlet in Périgord, adjoining the river Vézère, a boy is sent by his parents to live with a thirty-five year-old priest. Immersed in a midsummer rural environment of love and sensuality, where birds sing and frogs chorus amorously amid 'matchlessly seductive silences,' the boy finds himself stirred by similarly powerful resonances in his own flesh, and consents to sexual liasons with the priest, from whose whippings he first learns of the pleasures of mortification of the flesh. Soon he meets a thirteen year-old boy from the village, and the two instantly become infatuated with each other, venturing out to a nearby cave to make love (significantly, all the sexual encounters in the tale will be enacted in darkness). What we might term sexual morality is subordinate among the three protagonists to the ends of pleasure; it is only the external forces of the gendarmerie who try to 'police' sexuality. The narrator's statement that 'I was adoring a child in the depths of the earth' is unequivocal, and, in his eyes, non-problematic. Augiéras' text is rooted in the discrimination of sexual identity. There are no female characters in the novel, but the submissive partner in each relationship, as Foucault asserted in L'usage des plaisirs, necessarily adopts a feminine persona. The child says to the boy 'I am your little girl', while the boy considers his domestic / submissive relationship to the priest the act of 'a loving wife'. The quest for self-identity also permeates the narrative through the conscious symbols of mirrors and reflection, and the boy's decision to turn to writing and thus 'listen to my own voice for the first time'. Although the novel is set in modern Sardalais, it evinces a mythological timelessness, and the surroundings reflect this; the Black Périgord is 'a wild land....a land of spirits, sorcerers, Templars, barons, priests, peasants....still echoing to primeval cries'. The narrator's rich poetics of natural beauty, and the evocation of a world far more pagan than Christian, comprise an endeavour to discover the essence of this original state of nature, this 'chaos of primordial life'. Curiously then, a novel that depicts homosexuality among children, masturbation, and self-inflicted mutilation, develops into a quest for true innocence. In many senses the book is thus highly autobiographical, since Augiéras voluntarily slept in abandoned farms along the banks of the Vézère, and at times lived and worked in a cave, in an effort to distance himself from what he called 'a degraded civilisation'. And in this respect, The Sorcerer's Apprentice is masterful: led into an Eden where Nature is sovereign and our sexual taboos meaningless, we leave it wondering whether these characters have 'won now, you know', and it is we who have lost.
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