Word: authorly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...seal, this one with a fingerprint on the edge that was presumably made by Baruch himself. The second is an analysis that claims to fix the precise location where the Ark of the Covenant (the "Lost Ark" of Raiders fame) was stored. That's sure to be controversial; the author contends that it must have been placed in a rectangular indentation on the outcropping beneath the Dome of the Rock, the sacred Muslim shrine on the Temple Mount...
READ AS A WORK OF PURE IMAGInation, the powerfully written Holocaust chronicle that Hungarian author Janos Nyiri calls a novel (Battlefields and Playgrounds; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 536 pages; $25) has some inconsistencies. Most of these involve a too broad awareness of the military and political progression of the war, which might be appropriate to an adult survivor looking back at chaos, but not to the day-to-day fears of the young Jewish boy Jozska, eight years old at the war's outset, from whose point of view the story is told...
...Jozska--surely to some degree modeled after the author as a child in wartime Budapest--is a rowdy, unscholarly wise guy more interested in cutting class to play soccer than in learning Hebrew like a proper Jewish son. But as he races about the city, often daring the devil by leaving off his yellow star, he sees clearly that two kinds of disintegration are occurring. And that one of them, the falling apart of German military strength, will not happen soon enough to prevent the second, the collapse of Hungarian civic morality, from grinding to completion...
That's a load of bitter wisdom for a boy to carry. So the author lets Jozska's father, a con man and survivor, speak the summation. Blaming the entire German nation, this fellow says wryly, "would be too German ... so collective responsibility is probably a myth." Here we imagine a grimace from the cafe intellectual. "Collective irresponsibility, on the other hand, certainly exists...
DIED. ROBERTSON DAVIES, 82, author; in Orangeville, Ontario. Davies earned his Merlin-like mien: his novels were steeped in literal and figurative magic, juxtaposing Jungian soul searching and sweeping myth with minutely detailed portraits of Canadian provincialism. In fact, Davies was one of the first writers from that country to develop an international following. The best known of his works is the Deptford trilogy, which tracked the lives of a magician, his manager and a one-legged schoolmaster...