Word: claustral
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...pigment into a field of hatchings. There is so much overpainting and layering in her recent work that the paintings seem to have grown excruciatingly slowly. They carry a patina of doubt on every square inch of their surface. But they do breathe: light and air -- of a rather claustral kind, but atmosphere just the same -- bathe the bodies and unify them as objects in the world while threatening always to dissolve them as emblems of personality. The surfaces look as if they came via Philip Guston from Monet, picking up some of Giacomo Balla's futurist dissections of light...
...change this condition with a work of social criticism hat reads like a novel, though she makes no Mailerian claims for the achievement. She heartily dislikes Tarnower, his "repilian" face, his dictatorial and unimaginative diet book and his Westchester, N.Y., house, which she finds "Japanoid" and "claustral." From testimony and private conversation, she concludes that the cardiologist was "a small-time emotional imperialist," and "a glutton for other people's vulnerabilities." She gleefully notes that he took a nightly laxative mixed with applesauce and that, according to the autopsy report, the deceased was overweight by the standards set forth...
...slightly higher plane, one cannot help admiring Samperi's creation of a claustral atmosphere that makes believable both the boy's fetid sexuality and the girl's inability to escape his trap without destroying herself and his father. That she finally manages to do so, by reversing their roles, is also accomplished without suspension of belief. It even seems rather courageous and psychologically acute...
...were too busy building the church to bother about intellectual pursuits, and warned their congregations not to mix with the Protestant population. "The conservatives of the church," writes Shannon, "struggled to ensnare and pinion the live corpus of the faithful in their own petty vision, a vision of a claustral parish world: tidy, thick-curtained, breathing of dust, every antimacassar firmly in place...
...student body from rum and nicotine. The Kansas hatchet swinger, who personally broke enough whiskey bottles (full) to arouse envy in the heart of the most rabid prohibition agent, stepped off the electric car that carried her from Boston to Cambridge and went straight to those claustral walls, where a thousand students were eating their midday meal. She had heard that ham was occasionally served with champagne sauce and that she had seen a menu which listed jelly...