Chaos and Night

Don Celestino is old and bitter and afraid an impossible man. An anarchist who has been in exile from his native Spain for more than twenty years he lives with his daughter in Paris but in his mind he is still fighting the Spanish Civil War. He fulminates against the daily papers; he brags about his past exploits. He has become bigoted self-important and obsessed; a bully to his fellow exiles and a tyrant to his daughter Pascualita.<br><br> Then a family member dies in Madrid and there is an inheritance to sort out. Pascualita wants to go to Spain which is supposedly opening up in response to the 1960s and Don Celestino feels he has no choice but to follow. He is full of dread and desire foreseeing a heroic last confrontation with his enemies but what he encounters instead is a new commercialized Spain that has no time for the past much less for him. Or so it seems. Because the last act of Don Celestino&#146;s dizzying personal drama will prove that though &#147;there is nothing serious . . . there is tragedy.&#148;<br><br> An astonishing modern take on Don Quixote <i>Chaos and Night</i> untangles the ties between politics and paranoia self-loathing and self-pity rage and remorse. It is the darkly funny final flowering of the art of Henry de Montherlant a solitary and scarifying modern master whose work admired by Graham Greene and Albert Camus is sure to appeal to contemporary readers of Thomas Bernhard and Roberto Bola&#241;o.