Word: blacks
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Black Book. With an underground reputation like Miller's, Lawrence Durrell writes less of the subject that has kept Tropic of Cancer out of the U. S. But he puts in enough words to prevent The Black Book from being published anywhere except in Paris. Less shocking than Tropic of Cancer, The Black Book follows a similar pattern, with realistic scenes giving way to tumultuous passages of invective and bitter rhapsody...
Durrell is a 27-year-old Anglo-Irishman, born in Burma and raised on the border of Tibet, now working as clerk at the Ionian Bank in Corfu. Insofar as it has a story, The Black Book tells of a group of people living in a stuffy English hotel -all neurotic, frustrated, savage and obsessed with sex. The narrator brings home an 18-year-old tuberculous prostitute, Gracie, speculates about his neighbors, suffers a baffled, angry grief at Gracie's death...
...Black Book is primarily a volume of lamentations, breedings, prophecy, in which coarse, brutal or banal happenings at the hotel launch thoughts on the sickness...
...that this is the breakup, the cataclysm, the drop-curtain on the world. . . . In the Abbey they are still marking the places in the hymnbooks, oblivious of the fact that tomorrow we shall have forgotten how to read. . . . In London they are dancing round the Walpole. . . . In Calcutta the black sweep is wandering with crumbs in his eyes, touching the untouchable, and eating the uneatable. . . . It is all being washed up towards a madness never before seen. The heretics themselves are appalled: are building themselves Arks from the flotsam of the imagination, and hanging their viscera out for sails; they...
Across the aisle, quite lost and unnoticed in the subway crowd, sat her "Daddy", Richard Cresson Harlow, discussing with Skip Stahley and a few other cronies the great victory over Yale that afternoon. He carried his usual black satchel...