Word: absurdity
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...determined effort to re-connect herself with the world that other people live in. As a convalescent, she takes a job and, reluctantly, attends a cocktail party given by an old school friend. But she cannot achieve anything beyond a momentary rapport with the guests; she penetrates the absurd triviality of their preoccupations all too readily and retreats, bewildered, convinced that the fault must lie within herself...
...value. He seduces her, simultaneously initiating into the only experience which seems to her to contain its own meaning and effecting his own cure. When he leaves, she suffers a relapse, but eventually struggles out of it. Dispassionately, she returns to her initial view of life as comic, absurd and ultimately conditioned by chance. Rejecting the mothering safety of adjustment, she chooses to preserve her own integrity at the risk of an isolation that might again plunge her into despair...
...Samuel Abbott has transformed himself into a most excellently bloated and insufferable Tolloller. He has managed, somehow, to blend the most absurd elements of Oscar Wilde, Charles Laughton and Peter Ustinov into one vast horror of inane snobbery and scented incompetence. Only Mr. Abbott's Tolloller could have successfully produced, as he did, the quintessential Gilbertian line: "We were boys together;--at least...
...more than absurd, they are bestial and very evil. The crucial incident of the first chapter (Snow's novels abound in crucial incidents) is not a hasty or disastrous slip of the tongue, as it is the gruesome death of a young assistant keeper who is crushed to death by a diseased giraffe. For the Zoo's leaders, however, death has only a Snowbound political significance: Falcon, the Curator of Mammals, is directly responsible for the killing, but Leacock, the Director, decides not to mention the incident to him because in his own campaign for a "National Zoological Reserve...
...MUCH for the first chapter. In his nightmare inversion of C.P. Snow, Mr. Wilson has exposed the inadequacy of the decent man in a struggle for power, the moral bankruptcy of the struggle itself, and has even suggested that every such struggle may be inherently absurd. He has also written a magnificently sustained, if harsh, parody of Snow's novels. World he had left is at that...