Word: bravura
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...PRIME OF Miss JEAN BRODIE, by Muriel Spark (187 pp.; Llppincott; $3.95). Knowledgeable readers of Muriel Spark's novels admire such crystalline structures of malice as Memento Mori and The Ballad oj Peckham Rye partly for the economy with which they are built. Avoiding bravura writing as she would a vulgar display of pound notes, this Scotswoman sits composedly among her characters, goading them by silence and an infrequent equivocal smile to disclose their sins. Rarely does the exposure require more than 200 pages, and at the end of a Muriel Spark novel, most readers find themselves wondering...
...Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert-German and Austrian composers that he feels he can "go into for 30 or 40 years and never touch bottom." And his style, as he demonstrated again last week when he played Mozart's rarely heard Concerto in B-Flat Major, lies somewhere between Cliburn bravura and Gould introspection. The B-Flat Concerto was ideally suited to Browning's talent. A witty virtuoso piece, it gave him a chance to display his brilliant technique, particularly in a rippling right hand. But there were also the long lyric lines that seemed to uncoil effortlessly from Browning...
...Succeed in Business Without Really Trying is a bright, captivating spoof of corporate wheels and wiles. In a bravura display of officemanship, Robert Morse proves an irresistible comic wonder...
...Succeed in Business Without Really Trying is a bright, captivating spoof of corporate wheels and wiles. In a bravura display of officemanship, Robert Morse proves an irresistible comic wonder...
Bert's Pants. Caldwell's special quality is a wonderful ease; he evokes humor or horror without bravura or its opposite, the smug underplaying that leaves the reader, at the end of so many short stories, disappointedly clutching a glazed lump of irony in the form of a souvenir ashtray. Caldwell gives away no pottery. In a leisurely way, yet wasting no time with scene-setting, he lays out his dialogue and his few spare sentences of narration. The characters take shape quickly as the story forms. At the end, amazingly often, what the reader takes away...