The Red Virgin

Arrabal's ( The Tower Struck by Lightening ) fascinating novel offers a one-sided conversation in which a grieving mother addresses her daughter, whom she has murdered. As a young woman, the unnamed narrator discovered a book on alchemy that set her on the path of her life's work: to bear an ``austere, brilliant, unique'' child whose life would be dedicated to discovering the secret of the Philosopher's Stone. Her daughter, Vulcasais (named for fire and truth), is indeed brilliant, intellectually an adult at five years old. Concealed from the world by her watchful mother, she obediently slaves at their cellar furnace to distill elements into their purest form. Vulcasais's resistance to her life surfaces only in her secret diary, where she writes, ``I am the princess of filth'' and ``Down with Science!'' The girl's contact with the outer world is essentially limited to visits with Chevalier and Abelardo, their strangely chiasmatic neighbors (as one declines in health, the other flourishes--a situation that reverses periodically). But despite the narrator's resolute efforts to promote and control the quest for pure knowledge, elements beyond her reach converge to fatally undermine her ambition. (Sept.)