Word: berger
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...Thomas Berger Delacorte...
...subject for novelists. T.H. White produced an eloquent contemporary version in The Once and Future King, and only two years ago, the late John Steinbeck's dull but competent retelling of Le Morte d'Arthur, Sir Thomas Malory's 15th century compilation, was published. Now Thomas Berger offers still another rex redux, in the form of "a legendary novel." He might have done better to call it a haphazard parody...
...earlier novels, Berger proved himself a fine minor portraitist of the hapless, tough-talking American male: the middleclass, victimized hero of the Reinhart trilogy, the used-car salesmen and small-time gangsters in Sneaky People. Little Big Man, his burlesque epic of the wild West, and Who Is Teddy Villanova?, a brilliant imitation of the private-eye novel, displayed a notable talent for satire...
Arthur Rex features hard-boiled knights in a pseudo-Arthurian landscape, and the clash of styles has the discordant ring of crossed lances at a joust. His heroes talk obsessively of "paps" and "mammets" (not, as Berger supposes, a variant of mammaries, but a medieval reference to Muhammad). The labored effort to reproduce Malory's diction is a disaster. Horses are "sore thirsty," kings are "some vexed," lusty knights "swyve" damsels, addressed elsewhere as "chicks." Launcelot is said to have "filled a need for the queen," a disheartening summation of one of the world's most fabled love...
...oppressive document either in terms of practicality or principle, and I think any clear-headed individual regardless of race or origin must feel the same way. I would rather see no student government at all than a government which is an embarassment to common intelligence and morality. Andy Berger...