Word: blunden
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...terse account of hitting the beach at Iwo Jima. Worth reading were John Home Burns's The Gallery, a novel of a G.I.'s experiences in Naples, Charles Christian Wertenbaker's story of the French Forces of the Interior (Write Sorrow on the Earth), Godfrey Blunden's novel of Moscow and Muscovites in their grim winters of war and political despair (A Room on the Route). William Wister Haines's Command Decision, a tense story of hard choices at an A.A.F. headquarters, was made into a hit play on Broadway. The Steeper Cliff, David Davidson...
...James offered rich detail on a man who in the past three years has increasingly been regarded as America's greatest novelist. Franz Kafka was brought to life in Max Brod's biography and scalped in Paul Goodman's Franz Kafka: His Prayer. By comparison, Edmund Blunden's solid Shelley: A Life Story seemed a challenge to current taste...
...Australian, A Room on the Route has many qualities of traditional Russian fiction, including some that Russian writers have not recently dared to indulge. No Russian could write so honestly, and so far no Western visitor to Russia during the war has drawn such good fiction from his experience. Blunden was in Moscow for 14 months in 1942-43 as a correspondent for the Sydney Daily Telegraph...
...Gregor's mouth Novelist Blunden has put three stories, in the manner of Gogol, Chekhov and Dostoevsky respectively. Interspersed with these are chapters of action: Ivan at the front, stopping a Nazi light tank 25 kilometers from Moscow; his lieutenant, Kostia, dying in a hospital after a double amputation; Rachel's son, Karl, starving in a concentration camp to which he had been sent for remarking that Hitler's strategy was "cunning." Karl's hatred of the regime that imprisoned him hardens into conviction...
...setting of the novel is Moscow under the deep snow and deeper temperatures of midwinter, a setting that Blunden etches in many black-&-white details. The crowded misery of the people, their toughness, the splendor of the theater, which Ferguson calls "the opium of the people," a wide scale of Moscow types from factory worker to Red Army marshal, are rendered with fidelity and perception. The book's unifying theme is fear-the fear in which all these people live...