Word: balthazars
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...wanted something to remember all of us with, and I'm not quite sure I can forget about that. Brandon Balthazar...
...dour, stocky political patriarch of South Africa, Prime Minister Balthazar Johannes Vorster, 60, has the ironfistedness his fellow Afrikaners call kragdadigheid. He was known as "Jackboot John" when he served as Justice Minister under his National Party predecessor, Dr. Hendrik Verwoerd (who was stabbed by a demented clerk on the floor of the South African Parliament in 1966). The son of a Transvaal farmer, Vorster in his youth joined anti-English Afrikaner nationalist movements, becoming a "general" in what was believed to be a terrorist wing of the so-called Ox Wagon Guard, a pro-Nazi movement. His militant opposition...
...cases involves Dr. Eugene R. Balthazar, the founder of a highly regarded free clinic in Aurora, Ill. (TIME, Jan. 26), who was accused of malpractice by a woman treated for a facial malignancy. Though the patient's suit was tossed out of court, Balthazar and a colleague felt that they had been needlessly harassed. Charging "reckless disregard for the truth" and malicious prosecution, they are seeking only nominal damages of $2 from the woman but $20,600 from her two lawyers. Another Illinois doctor has taken a different stance: he has charged a patient's lawyer with barratry...
This theme of denied fulfillment--and its relation to money--is expanded in quite a different way in Donleavy's next novels, A Singular Man, The Saddest Summer of Balthazar B, and particularly The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B. In Beastly Beatitudes, Donleavy proffers a hero entirely antithetical to Sebastian Dangerfield. Balthazar ("possession of treasure") is sincere, decent, loving and wealthy. Yet he is plagued by the same consuming unhappiness as Dangerfield. The tone of the whole book, in fact, is unlike that of The Ginger Man: Balthazar B is a wistful tale, and though lightened by brilliant flashes...
...sadness that living is not what he would conceive it or hope it to be. In the jacket photo, Donleavy's face is wary, truculent even, thoroughly distrustful. You suspect the jaunty mien, the gentlemanly deportment, is a carefully constructed guise. "I live and draw a flow of gold," Balthazar B thinks to himself, "from a dead father's reservoir of riches. Behind my own lonely elegance. Where no one will ever again get to know me. And speak less and less." Donleavy has donned that genteel mask in The Unexpurgated Code, and what he would say behind the facade...