Van Toch handles the newts on the field, GH Bondy manages the pearl trade back in Europe. Bondy, a tradesman who accepts this weird pearls/salamander business. Van Toch is like a character by André Malraux, an adventurer. Van Toch likes the newts and strikes an agreement with them: he provides knives to help them fend off their enemies, they fish oysters for his pearl business. Better than that, if he trades knives with them, they can fish oysters and help him find pearls. Van Toch goes there anyway and discovers that the so-called devils are actually salamanders. One day, he hears about Devil’s Island, a place that the locals avoid because it’s populated by devils. When the book opens, Captain Jan Van Toch is a sailor who does trade in the Indonesian waters and he barely makes ends meet. It sounds bucolic said like this but War of the Newts is more a humorous but serious declaration against the pitfall of wild capitalism. Published in 1936, it’s a dystopian fiction where Čapek imagines a world where a huge population of newts grows and lives under the sea. War With the Newts by Karel Čapek is our Book Club choice for December. War With the Newts by Karel Č apek (1936) French title: La guerre des salamandres.
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