Word: author
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Author Panova shares Boris Pasternak's poetic affection for the Russian land. Serioja races across "black velvet ploughland" or watches the white-snow cling like "fat white caterpillars on the branches of the trees." Toward novel's end, the boy tastes bitter desolation when his stepfather is assigned a new post, and it appears that Serioja's health may force the family to leave him behind. At the last moment, seeing that parting will destroy the child, the stepfather scoops him up in a happy ending that is movingly true to the essential spirit of the book...
...onetime winner of the Stalin Prize, Author Panova has been in and out of favor with the Soviet's politico-literary authorities. The chief charge against her: "Objectivity." Time Walked, too, is objective in that it is honestly observed, cleanly written, and as free of sentimentality as it is rich in compassion...
Newark-born Philip Roth, 26, onetime English instructor at the University of Chicago, is a Jew himself and writes of Jews with an absorbing ambivalence of hate and love. Author Roth's broadly farcical stories, The Conversion of the Jews and Epstein, are too heavyhanded; but his tender passages between young Jews in love are often a delight, and his set pieces-weddings, multiple-course dinners, the frequent inability of Jews and gentiles to understand each other though using the same language-have style and the outrageousness of life itself...
Delight in Destruction. To Author Gray, war is at once an ecstasy and an agony, and he examines both with a philosopher's brooding eye. War, he believes, has enduring appeals: "Some scenes of battle, much like storms over the ocean or sunsets on the desert or the night sky seen through a telescope, are able to overawe the single individual and hold him in a spell." There is also the "communal joy" of comradeship and, sometimes, the delight in destruction: "Men who have lived in the zone of combat long enough to be veterans are sometimes possessed...
...were writing more seriously, Author Love might well include a soldier who certainly led his own life, constantly asking his comrades how they felt about death, marveling at the spectacle of war, wondering at man's urge to destroy. That man would have been Lieut. Glenn Gray, writing to a friend on the riddle of cruelty: "Joy and beauty have many different faces, but brutality and hatred have but few. I have come to the extremity of knowing beyond all doubt that there is no other way for me to survive this period except the hard Christian...