The Hermit

In his only novel, the celebrated dramatist has choen as his main character a man who is bothe utterly banal yet strangely touched with grace, a lowly clerk who is none-the-less prey to luminous visions. At 35 he quits the "rat-race" thanks to an unexpected inheritance and devote himself to his secret observing and meditating on the human condition. "It may well be" wrote the French critic Fracois Nourissier in Le Point , "that in a few years we will come to realize that The Hermit is one of the essential works of our time, probing and detailing the illness of our century.