Word: arlecq
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Though they do not know it at first, they would be just as itchily and angrily at home nearly anywhere else as they are in dreary old Leipzig. Fries' hero, Arlecq, escapes to West Berlin in search of Oobliadooh, a storied dreamland delineated in song by Dizzy Gillespie, a prince of bebop. Sickened by the banalities of Communist bureaucracy, Arlecq looks forward to the delights of the West (or "the WEST," as he put it). When he finally does reach Oobliadooh, he finds things just as unsatisfactory as they were back home. "I must insist on a little more...
...author's literary heroes, T. S. Eliot, Proust and Truman Capote. There are also resonances from Joseph Heller. One can imagine Heller's Captain Yossarian, sitting up there in the sky, cursing the night, as the U.S. Air Force drops a bomb in the garden that Arlecq recollects from his own childhood. "It is still a good eight weeks till Easter," Fries writes, "but Arlecq's uncle in America has sent this early Easter...
...willfully disjointed in the telling. Elegantly bored, they spend much of their time lounging in bed or bars, or leafing through the works of Marx, Lenin and Stalin in the public library to find pages mutilated or subversive notations made by angrier, cruder objectors to the System. Yet as Arlecq drifts from reflections on jazz music, to two desultory love affairs, to a funeral, to scenes from the failed marriage of a friend, the author manages some artful acts that reveal the writer behind the discontented esthete. Moments of fiction materialize, coolly precise, sharp and fresh as the crinkle...
Even Fries' humor sounds crisp, though its predictable source lies in the absurdity of the current scene and the pretentious twaddle of all establishments, whether founded upon outworn socialist unrealities or rampant democratic rhetoric. Arlecq puts in a stint as a government guide, conducting a party of Indonesian comrades from Goethe's shrine in Weimar to the Buchenwald concentration camp where, in spite of his efforts, the Indonesians beam and smile, mistaking it for a prehistory museum. He also works as an interpreter at an international conference. When the Cuban spokesman takes the floor, Arlecq switches...
| 1 |