Word: chimera
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...political unity that the Market's founders hoped would come with the elimination of national barriers has proved a chimera, and the 7,000-man Common Market Commission in Brussels has devoted much of its time to the minutiae of trade. It labored for months over a Europe-wide recipe for sauce bearnaise, for example; the problem was the quantity of tarragon to include. With elegant understatement, Dutch Under Secretary Laurens Brinkhorst admits that "people no longer think the Community is relevant to solving the problems of their daily lives." Laments Jean Monnet, a founder of the Market: "Europe...
...joined the elite clan headed by Don Quixote, chasers of chimera on the horizon which turn out to be windmills turning vapidly in the air. But Spain, that nurturer of fantasies and distiller of dreams, has witnessed the loss of more serious things than one's pants. In this century its seared soil has sucked up the blood of endless thousands of men and women who had a vision and were willing to risk their lives to see it realized...
...small town outside Cologne. His father was a schoolteacher. From earliest childhood Ernst seems to have acquired haunting visual images. Some came during sickness. He remembers being ill and staring for hours at some mahogany plywood paneling, discerning there the shape of a dove, a nightingale, a girl-chimera-all familiar in his work...
...trouble with Chimera is that Barth has grown too ambitious too fast. He is trying all at once to create new narrative forms, to engage in political satire and to tell stories. But the form is not yet ready, the satire is shrill, and the stories suffer. Chimera is an attempt to join the mythic experiments of Lost in the Funhouse with the storytelling--extravagance of The Sot-Weed Factor, and Barth himself seems not to have realized how monumental a task that...
...Chimera is finally unsatisfying, unrealized. Barth's imagination has soared higher, his wit has pierced sharper. Still, there are moments when it is all working, when the myth, the irony, and the experiment resolve themselves into some sort of precarious harmony, and the radical possibilities of this fiction come clear. So it is not too much to hope that the seventies will yet bear what the sixties begot. It is not too much to hope that Barth's best work is still unwritten...