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Word: backe (lookup in dictionary) (lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
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Nostalgia is what we like today: warm, a bit muzzy, with lots of generalizing dips back into a past full of evocative stage props and period business. Memory is another matter. Remembering truthfully is as difficult as inventing well -- indeed, more so; hence the paucity of good memoirs. "You must never undertake the search for time lost," warns the last sentence of Gregor von Rezzori's The Snows of Yesteryear, "in the spirit of nostalgic tourism." The rest of the book shows how carefully he has obeyed this precept...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Books: Fall Into Chaos | 12/25/1989 | See Source »

American readers know Rezzori mainly for two richly convoluted memory novels of Europe before and after World War II, Memoirs of an Anti-Semite (1981) and The Death of My Brother Abel (1985). The Snows of Yesteryear looks back before their time frame, to the childhood and, implicitly, the formation of a writer. It leads into a world now irretrievably lost, its values blown away by World War I and its fortunes wrecked by the inflationary '20s -- "For the class to which my parents belonged . . . a fall into chaos, into impotence and deprivation...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Books: Fall Into Chaos | 12/25/1989 | See Source »

Strong material, then; and Rezzori follows this family labyrinth back with a fine disdain for sentiment, a transparency of feeling, an acid sense of humor and a vigilant eye for nuances of love and indifference, language, landscape and class behavior. It is not a young man's (or a moralist's) book. But it is intensely moving and contains, in its winding and ironic cadences, not a slack sentence: a performance in a difficult key about the making of a near extinct kind of European...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Books: Fall Into Chaos | 12/25/1989 | See Source »

...senior editor, rather than send them by telex. Consumed by the deadline rush, White snapped, "Can't you get to a machine? It really would make things easier for us." Suddenly, a loud explosion echoed across Beirut -- and over the telephone line. Said White: "I take that back. I'll write it down...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: From the Publisher: Dec 25 1989 | 12/25/1989 | See Source »

...Realizing that "my streak of self- destructiveness had to end," McGuane quit drinking and poured himself into writing. Two novels -- Nobody's Angel (1982) and Something to Be Desired (1985) -- were followed by To Skin a Cat (1986), a well-received collection of short stories that helped put McGuane back on the literary track...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: TOM MCGUANE: He's Left No Stone Unturned | 12/25/1989 | See Source »

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