Word: anguishes
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...obligation to express") in the title he has chosen for this anthology, but he makes his selections in order to expose the remarkable continuity of Beckett's expression. In view of his fairly consistent production from 1929 through 1975, Beckett's labors seem less a romantic existentialist's anguish of creation than a diligent craftsman's continuing search for innovative forms...
...precisely for these reasons, Born on the Fourth of July succeeds and is memorable. An intimate and convincing portrait of Kovic emerges: we permit him his autobiographical indulgences as well as his justified outrage. This serves to continually remind us that he is a real man choked with sincere anguish, longing to be heard, and not a literary fiction. Look at me, Kovic seems to say, and never forget the war that made me what...
...text of The Serpent is often banal enough to make one cringe. A couple of lengthy exchanges of verbal non sequiturs, supposed articulations of existential anguish, are peppered with McKuenesque dilemmas. Someone tells of passing a friend on the street without trading any greeting--each of them feared the other had looked through instead of at him. Someone else describes a dinner party where she wanted to "scratch out the women's eyes" and "grab the men's balls"--a lame evocation of hostility made even more hokey by the gratuitous vulgarity. While couples copulate with increasing fervor and come...
...conflicts Stephanie supposedly resolves. All Gray's protagonist has to offer in the way of hard-earned wisdom is a cutesy line about taking the bad with the good: "That's what life is all about...Garlic and sapphires in the mud. There's quite a bit of anguish hidden behind our placid, blissful exteriors...
...other characters are Clara's drunken stepfather; her uncle, an exhausted, ironical pederast; and a middleaged, neuter male publisher who is a family friend. There is too much drinking, too much smoking, too much acute description of mental states. The author, unwilling to waste a scrap of anguish, views the browned-out scene through the eyes of each gloomy participant in turn. Boredom, peevishness and tobacco smoke solidify into a gel. Everyone has dinner in a restaurant, and it takes a long time to order...