Word: comico
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Labels as diverse as fantasist, caricaturist, romantic and symbolist have been applied to Malamud, but he laughs at these terms and suggests: "tragico-comico, realistico-fabulistico; the more the merrier!" As for the themes often singled out in his stories--defeated love and failed ambition, imprisoned souls and claustrophobic lives, spiritual rebirth and redemptive suffering--he asserts that these are universal, and are there for anyone who wants to find them. "Not everything I put in consciously is noted, and people find things in my work I never knew were there. I try not to interpret my works to others...
Malamud laughs at the labels which contemporary critics have pinned on him. "Tragico-comico, realistico-fabulistico; the more the merrier...
...This comico-tragic instant brings to bear, like the point of a knife, the dilemma of 19th Century Jean Barois and the meaning of his story. It is the fulcrum of the cold, sharp "novel of ideas" which won Novelist Roger Martin du Gard his first critical respect when it was published in France in 1913. Martin du Gard went on to win a Nobel Prize (1937) for his masterwork, The Thibaults, a magnificent cycle of novels about French bourgeois life in the first two decades of the 20th Century...
...unveiling Baron Gabor de Bessenyey, scholar, raconteur, friend of the artist, orated, comico-seriously: "This is the 20th-century Last Supper. As in another picture of the same subject a banquet scene of the cinquecento was portrayed, here we have a typical genre picture of the 20th Century. In the original it was the last supper for One Man: in this, alas, it is often the last supper of many...
...Faulkner-Simon & Schuster ($2). If the recent heat wave had done nothing more than bring this ephemeral bloom to flower, it was worth it. Seldom has a first novel been written with higher good humor or a more disarming wit than Virginia Faulkner's Friends and Romans.* A "comico-romantic novel," it breaks nobody's bones or butterflies, lets no threatening skeletons loose on a frightened world, hurls no manifesto, literary or political. Pertinacious sniffers might accuse Author Faulkner of abetting James Joyce in attempting to restore the pun as an honest figure of speech; but most readers...
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