Darconville's Cat
Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1981.
First Edition. Hardcover.
A scarce first state of the First Edition with checkered grid on p.483 (in later editions the rectangle is rendered all black).
Review copy with letter on Doubleday stationery signed by Sam (Samuel S. Vaughan, Publisher and one-time Editor-in-Chief). In his letter, Vaughan describes the novel, for which he feels a "most excessive affection," as "prodigious, romantic, allusive, demanding, exasperating, funny, as clear as malice and as dark as death." A blank postcard, pre-addressed to Mr. Vaughan at Doubleday and postmarked February 9, 1981, is provided for the recipient to "Let me know what you think, unless you're rendered speechless."
Named one of Anthony Burgess's Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English Since 1939 - A Personal Choice (1984) and cited as one of American literary critic Larry McCaffery's 20th Century's Greatest Hits (#84 out of a total of 100).
Alaric Darconville, a professor at Quinsy College in Virginia, falls in love with a young student who eventually breaks his heart. From the dust wrapper flap: “Darconville's Cat is a novel about love and hate. Among other matters, it deals with the delicate tensions between Life and Art, the Ideal and the Real, God and Satan, and, above all, with the crises and conflicts between Man and Woman, the tragic implications of which reach all the way back to the Primal Fall.”
Like Darconville, Theroux hails from New England, entered a Trappist Monastery and a Franciscan Seminary as a young man, and was a college professor (Theroux has taught at Virginia's Longwood University, University of Virginia, Harvard, Yale, & MIT). The illustration of Darconville on the front of the dust wrapper is a reproduction of a self-portrait painted by the author.
Item #901910ISBN: 038515951X
6-1/4 x 9-3/8”, gilt-titled black cloth, black endpapers, xi, 704pp.
A little mild crimping heel of spine, minor rubbing to first free endpaper, mild toning to deckled fore-edge, crisp, clean, very near fine in dust wrapper that is a bit toned on underside and shows a bit of modest wear to extreme corners and spine ends, in protective mylar.
Price: $750.00