Word: albinus
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...more than a century, it is a man-made abomination-fat and degenerate, faithful neither to its wild ancestry nor to its laboratory role as a distorted mirror of man. "Theories are tested upon it," says Lockard. "Students are trained with it, and generalizations are based upon it. If albinus is misleading, so are many of the products of psychology...
Like the professor of The Blue Angel, Albinus, a middle-aged Berlin art dealer, is pudgy, pompous and naive, a kind of pachyderm in a panic whose downfall is chilling precisely because a sardonic hilarity bubbles continuously through the pathos. In the velvety darkness of a movie theater, Albinus (no last name) is hypnotized by the usherette's "pale, sulky, painfully beautiful face.'' Margot is one of the daughters of the poor who have learned the market quotations on fair white bodies. Albinus, respectably and dully married, is enthralled by her, not because she is earthy...
...cartoonist named Axel Rex emerges out of Margot's past, and his urbane chitchat somehow convinces Albinus that three is no crowd. Besides, Axel stills Albinus' qualms with a ploy at least as old as Restoration comedy: he confides to Albinus that he is really a homosexual. Soon clouds mass amid the comic lightning. After a series of tragic plot incidents, Albinus drives into a telephone pole, but lives on, blinded. What follows is more climactic and cruel than the book's actual ending. Axel silently shares the house and Margot, while the pair mulct the pitiable...