Word: brutality
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...bleak masterpiece, written without sentimentality, its anger a cold, controlled fury rather than a shrill rage. The surface of its unshowy prose disguises an enormous achievement for the realist political novel. Li's relentless calibration of the cost paid by the innocent to sustain a dehumanizing and brutal sociopolitical order marks it as a milestone in the literature of oppressed, extinguished lives...
...then, that the novel itself cannot live up to the promise of a hidden classic. A brief work of only 150 pages, told in dense four-page episodes, “Death in Spring” creates a world at once strange and familiar: a nameless town characterized by brutal, gratuitous violence and the prevalence of the bizarre, narrated through an unusual set of eyes—those of a teenage boy. Rodoreda’s narrator is a remarkably dispassionate protagonist, remarking in turns on the macabre and the surreal with unflinching ambivalence.Comparison is impossible to resist, as Rodoreda...
...this approach, “Hunger” bravely reveals the visceral underbelly of a well-known event in English and Irish history. McQueen illustrates with profound artistry the eerie quiet of a hunger strike and the severe calm with which Sands chooses to die. The result is a brutal and emotional film that seeks not to entertain, but instead to let the corporeal imagery speak for itself.—Staff writer Noël D. Barlow can be reached at nbarlow@fas.harvard.edu...
...songs on “Living Thing” had come close to matching the single’s riotous energy and imagination, we would have had a real winner on our hands. “Living Thing” starts off with the shimmering synths and brutal drum machine beats of opener “The Feeling.” Spasmodic guitars and tidy handclaps round out the atmosphere. “It Don’t Move Me” carries over the same handclaps, placing them over a piano riff borrowed from Björk?...
...young woman traveling through the Taiga, a shapeshifting animal who just happens to be her lover, a forest queen, and a crude and brutal rake— surprisingly, these characters are not out of a medieval fable. Instead, they are central elements of “The Hazards of Love,” the new concept album from indie favorites The Decemberists. The 17-song rock opera never stops plowing forward from the second it begins, with a mix of folk and in-your-face heavy metal that makes it one of the most inventive folk-rock albums in recent...