Word: comic
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...novel's only success is in its title. The comedians are all the characters, playing out their painful, useless little lives under the blistering sun, supposedly caring deeply about all sorts of things which can be considered only comic when compared to the course of humanity itself, or the universe. Every once in a while the narrator steps back and comments on how they are all comedians, as sad and funny as clowns on a stage. The real irony is that the narrator never has to step back and comments on how they are all comedians, as sad and funny...
...well sustained, though Burgess now modestly sees the Virgilian parallel as a "tyro's method of giving his story a backbone," as Joyce used the Odyssey to underpin Ulysses. But Burgess is not Virgil any more than Joyce was Homer. His hero loses nothing by being a comic rather than a classic. He has also been given another dimension. If Ennis is not much of a Roman, he is fatally a Roman Catholic, a failed one, trying to get free of his faith. He has not been to confession in 16 years; he is on the run from...
...past with Nothing like the Sun, his Elizabethan tour de force, or the Orwellian future with The Clockwork Orange (TIME, Feb. 15, 1963). Burgess has said that he was surprised to find that Vision turned out to be a funny book. Perhaps this seriousness is the clue to his comic flair; the human world is a masque; both gods and demons speak through the disguise men wear for faces...
...with a reputation as a classic. But Munk's film stands up less well than Ozu's under the glare of posthumous appraisal. It looks like a roughing out of the masterwork that it was meant to be-one angry young Pole's bitter, blackly comic jeer at wartime myths of courage and honor...
...Germany and Stalin's Russia in the blood of victims who outnumbered Torquemada's by more than 1,000 to one. Another ex-Communist did rather better. Using the heavier stones of current history, Arthur Koestler built Darkness at Noon into something more than an adult horror comic; he made his book a classic defense against the ogres of absolutism who think that their political faith gives them power over the minds and bodies of other men. Koestler brought a better mind to the subject; he began by renouncing the inquisitor within himself. Fast's book...