Word: authority
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Whiplash Currents. Why does Mizoguchi hate the Golden Temple? Novelist Mishima answers in many ways, none completely successful. The gist of it is that Japan, Author Mishima implies, has been hemmed in to the point of impotence by the worship of ancestors, ritual and beauty. In this sense, Temple belongs to recent, agonizing reason-why literature, in which Japanese writers are still covertly psychoanalyzing the loss of World War II. Mizoguchi is both poor and common, and Temple champions a kind of cultural revolt of the masses, with its rejection of all that is feudal and aristocratic. There...
Coming after 29-year-old Author Feibleman's exceptional first novel, A Place Without Twilight (TIME, March 3, 1958), the new book is a disappointment. But for all its melodrama and its occasional flavor of Charles Addams under the magnolias, it is still well worth reading. Feibleman is a fine stylist who almost never gets his hands sticky. He sees people shrewdly, and can set down small scenes with great poignancy. The episode that ends the book is a masterpiece-even though it parodies the whole novel and the entire Southern school of literary fungus munchers. After the hero...
...best way of expressing an early-teen-age love is to jump out of a bamboo thicket in the path of his girl's bicycle and scare her half to death. One terrible night, he witnesses his mother in the act of adultery. It is typical of Author Mishima's gift for powerful indirection that this entire episode is conveyed in terms of a ripple of mosquito netting...
Though his nature descriptions are superb, chrysanthemums and moon mist rarely monopolize Author Mishima's vision. He is especially good at charting the whiplash currents of the Japanese temperament, swerving in an instant from refinement to cruelty. His tilt with tradition is spirited but distinctly un-Japanese. Since 1950, the Kinkakuji has been meticulously rebuilt, and may well gaze at its limpid image in the Kyoko Pond for another demi-millennium...
...Author Birmingham may be thanked for a series of small fictional favors. He can find a status symbol in a haystack ("French bread means somebody for dinner"). He makes nurses and vice presidents and suburbanites speak with tape-recorded fidelity and occupational rightness. And his multiple flashbacks rarely loom up like detour signs. Unfortunately, mannerisms do not make the man, and Novelist Birmingham's deft social observations lack the probing roots of Marquand's social experience...