Word: buechner
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...George Buechner wrote Danton when he was 21, and with all the grandiosity one would expect of a young German fatalist and revolutionary. Pronouncements follow epigrams in endless, dulling sequence. In Mueller's translation, at least, it is hard to believe that the characters could be taking themselves seriously. There is almost no psychological exposition more subtle than Danton's announcement that he is bored with the Revolution, or Collot D'Herbois' mechanical callousness...
...there is a feeling of doom about the play--a current that moves below the froth of conversation. The mockery of the whores, the very emptiness of Robespierre's rhetoric, make Buechner's point: that man has no free will, that the dreary sameness of life must over-take the most heroic and the most corrupt. Reading the play, I felt this undertow. At the Loeb, I didn...
...popular, though Christian. The real-life problem has apparently confronted Frederick Buechner, 38, a talented proseur (A Long Day's Dying, The Return of Ansel Gibbs) who was ordained a Presbyterian minister in 1958 and now serves as chaplain at Phillips Exeter Academy. In this precious pseudoreligious novel, the author sounds like an eager young padre at a prep-school bull session, the type who yanks off his collar, chug-a-lugs a yard of beer, belches a couple of four-letter words, and in general suggests that in the beginning was the dirty word...
...hero of Buechner's book is a parson of no importance in a small New England town, an infantile irreverend who tries to please the kiddies by mixing divinity with inanity-"Our Father who aren't in Heaven," he keeps chirping, "Harold be Thy name." He tries to please the ladies by mixing divinity with lust, but somehow he never quite makes the scene-the redheaded heroine has to employ her husband when she brings the novel to its mystical climax. "She laughed into his throat as the chill weight pitched over her, warm beneath the chill...
This is supposed to be poetic prose, but one of Buechner's characters has a different idea. "Words are my undoing," he confesses to a friend. "My unraveling. Like a golf ball when you take the cover off-all those miles and miles of rubbery string. I've been reeling words out of my gut for years, I suppose to find out one day what there is at the middle of me." The friend thoughtfully replies that at the middle, as far as he can see, there is "a little kernel of warm, stale...