Word: angeles
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...listeners inclined to an earlier, lusher and more lyrical Richard Strauss. Angel has a superb new Rosenkavalier (on 4 LPs). Strauss's swirling, silvery tunes never sounded better. Herbert von Karajan, conducting London's Philharmonia Orchestra and Chorus, is pliant and powerful; Singers Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Teresa Stich-Randall and Christa Ludwig are uniformly excellent. They invest their climactic closing trio with even more than its usual aching grandeur, while Otto Edelmann's Baron Ochs combines authority with the required asininity...
...Kerouac seems to tire of spending a paragraph or two on people who sit around shooting benzedrine tubes at each other with an air gun. Toward the end of the book he contents himself with describing one party by listing names: "'Dean?' I yelled across the party--which included Angel Luz Garcia, the poet; Walter Evans; Victor Villanueva, the Veneauelan poet; Jinny Jones, a former love of mine;...(etc.)... and innumerable others--'Come over here, man.'" The lack of concreteness keeps the book sexless, despite the incredible amount of sleeping around. Kerouac has a long...
...Angel really knows nothing of the high life she preposterously describes (in her books, champagne bottles are opened with corkscrews). Indeed, she knows nothing of life at all, and refuses to learn. She does not copy from other books: it all comes out of the recesses of her appalling imagination. She is arrogant, vain and unfeeling-a child in a permanent lifelong tantrum. When her huge, ferocious dog kills a small terrier, she insists it was the terrier that attacked; when the critics accurately describe her work as ludicrous, she insists (and firmly believes) that they are spiteful, jealous fools...
...novels bring her fame, riches, even Paradise House. Money enables Angel to capture a husband, and bore him to death. She turns his spinster sister into her slavish admirer. Her gentle publisher views her with pity and terror. Nearly everyone else is appalled by her selfishness, her indifference to the pain of others. But people cannot touch her, for Angel is totally without humor and icily armored against embarrassment, against all reality...
With a heroine as unlikely and unlovely as Medusa, Novelist Taylor (A Wreath of Roses-TIME, March 21, 1949) has magically managed to write a brilliant and extremely funny book. At the end of a long life, the pride and pretense that made Angel unbearable in success make her magnificent in failure. Her outrageous behavior is somehow transmuted into tenderness. Ill and dying, she has a moment of believing that she is a child again, back in her mother's tiny grocery shop near the brewery, with factory sirens about to shred the morning air, and all of life...