Word: absurd
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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This is followed by an inquisitorial barrage of absurd personal questions that might have been dreamed up in a collaboration between Kafka and lonesco. After this humiliation, Coco turns on his impassive tormentor in a tirade that is pitiful but disruptive, the only flaw -and a slight one-in an otherwise memorable production. Giving an enormously resourceful performance, James Coco is a kind of vulnerable pixy. He can bare every scar on his psyche and yet coyly tease a line the way a hairdresser teases a curl...
Portnoy's Complaint, a novel in the form of a psychoanalytic monologue carried on by a guilt-ridden bachelor, is too funny not to be taken seriously. It is a Jewish Psychological Sex Novel of the Absurd. It is a work of farce that exaggerates and then destroys its content, leaving a gaping emptiness...
Strung out on Dr. Spielvogel's couch, Portnoy becomes the first of the lie-down comics. Raised in Newark and now holding the post of Assistant Human Opportunities Commissioner in New York City, he renders his past absurd in an attempt to lessen its painful grip on him. He keens the familiar tale of the strongwilled, overattentive mother and the castrated father. He tells how his mother fondled him during toilet training, how she eroticized the insides of his ears while removing the wax, and how she forced him to eat at knife point. Portnoy is continuingly being floored...
Bruno dies on the last page. Much of the book is taken up with an intricately choreographed, totally absurd mating dance set in motion around his fusty deathbed, as various relatives pursue each other in preposterous shifting triangles like the occupants of a French bedroom farce. They even fight a mock duel. Most kinetic is a cheerful, kindly son-in-law named Danby in whose house Bruno is dying. Danby begins by sharing his bed with Adelaide the maid, then flirts with his brother-in-law's wife and finally consorts with an ex-nun named Lisa...
...they cited two, both of whom then wrote letters that they would not withdraw their ad from HarBus it BAD were allowed on campus. The Business School administration lost the letters before reading them. "The Business School was financially irrelevant to us," Lewis said, "but this was so absurd that it got our goat." And this fall, when they attempted to deliver again, the complaint came with-in a week...