Word: crime
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...TUESDAY NIGHT AT THE MOVIES (NBC, 9-11:15 p.m.). Oskar Werner and Julie Christie star in Fahrenheit 451 (1967), about a futuristic society where owning and reading books is a crime...
...late 1920s. Eliot's attitude toward Passant in the first book became fondly equivocal, for he served as a continual reminder that certain kinds of selflessness, though admirable, are self-destructive. Folded into this late volume, Passant is made to stand for something more. Eliot sees the dreadful crime under examination at least partly as the result of an innocent addiction to humanist hopefulness about man, along with the corollary doctrine of unfettered personal freedom-both typical of Passant's thinking. During the trial of the two young harpies a nostalgic form of liberalism is also being weighed...
With unimpeachable acumen, Snow has thus chosen a minor theme close to the central preoccupations of the times. He has also chosen a major crime whose details are sure to titillate and open the doors to a number of fashionable speculations-about the crime of punishment, about the existence of evil and the nature of man. Working them thematically for all they are worth, Snow has produced a book that is bound to provoke a great deal of reflection-but that is also a very bad novel...
...story of men's lives can be made passionately interesting by the mere assertion that it is so. In The Sleep of Reason, despite Snow's best efforts, Eliot remains a mere observer. For though Eliot never permits himself the indulgence of easy indignation over the crime, he cannily refuses to press thought to its extremes. He ends by acknowledging that his experience has induced him to believe in "something like original sin." Even in context, this comes off little better than the tag end of a sententious newspaper editorial...
Significantly, one of the few places where the novel threatens to break through and touch Eliot's life (and the reader's) in some recognizably profound and moving way occurs as he ponders a discussion he is having with his wife Margaret about the crime, and likens it to an earlier conversation he had with one of the murderers. "There had been questions pounding behind my tongue . . . What did she do? What did they say to each other? What was it like to do it? For me in the jail, for Margaret in our drawing room, those questions...