The Virgin King

(price-clipped) [tight, clean book, with minor wear to the extremities, light previous owner's stamp on the first two front endpapers; the jacket is moderately edgeworn, with some rubbing and scuffing to the front panel, very shallow paper loss at the spine ends, and a small (1" x 1/4") puncture-tear on the rear panel which slightly affects the text thereon]. Satirical novel of "dictatorships, colored shirts, and national salvation through 'blood, dirt, and faith'," set in a mythical Ruritanian sort of Mittel-European kingdom. In tone and substance (and chronology), the book falls somewhere in the zone between the Marx Bros.' DUCK SOUP and Chaplin's THE GREAT DICTATOR. The titular figure is a young Englishman who parachutes into "Gorboduchy" and becomes its dictator by virtue of the yellow shirt he happens to be wearing at the time; he is, however, merely a figurehead, manipulated from behind the scenes by a poet with decidedly fascist inclinations. The shots taken at Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy are unsubtle, and while one contemporary reviewer opined that the author "writes with facility, charm and impudence" and praised "his whimsical presentment of the absurdities and stupidities into which such a system leads a nation," another felt that he "has been only whimsical [and that] there is so much whimsy in his totalitarian State, in fact, that it is difficult to believe in its wickedness." (In one weird mash-up of actual history, the Yellow Shirts -- the dictator's storm troopers -- are tasked with persecuting the Gypsies instead of the Jews -- due to the country's tradition of treating the Jews well, specifically to deny them the persecution on which they supposedly thrive!)

Product Info

Publisher: D. Appleton-Century Company

Year: 1936

Type: Used

Binding: Hardcover

First Edition

Seller Info

ReadInk

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Country: United States