Word: cryptics
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...knowing when to say nothing at all. and Uwe Johnson has mastered it. One of a handful of young German writers (TIME, Jan. 4) who are just now working the literary equivalent of Germany's economic miracle, Johnson, 29, has produced a provocative novel full of cryptic clues and calculated silences, inviting the reader to fill in the blank spaces with his own imagination. The result is a remarkably intimate look at life in East Germany, a finely shaded inquiry into the small tensions of a divided world...
...negotiate "in the shadow of nuclear war" and make "the live-or-die decisions when the chips are down." As cliches mount, the reader half expects the next phone call to be answered by old Scab Cooley. But instead it is McGeorge Bundy who hears a CIAman's cryptic, spy-befuddling report of the Soviet missiles in Cuba. "Those things we've been worrying about"; says the CIAman cleverly, "it looks as though we've really got something." There is even room to mention a minor Russian official in Washington named Georgi Bolshakov, who is duped...
...intent in changing bosses. "I like the contract better than the one I had," said he, in a characteristically oblique reference to the fact that he will obviously get more money. From the columnist's previous employer, Herald Tribune Publisher John Hay Whitney, came still an even more cryptic explanation: "Mr. Lippmann has felt that since he lives in Washington, he would prefer to have administrative matters connected with syndication handled by a Washington paper." And who else lives in Washington? Joe Alsop-whose contract with the Trib expires next year...
Among the more cryptic of these epigrams are the following: "A hyena does not drive a cow," and "A spider does not sit that people may teach it to speak through the nose...
...nature. The C.O. is the perfect portrait of the manipulator of means who forgets ends and comes to accept the terms of war as the norm of existence. When Loomis asks, "What do you feel when you kill a man?", Endore counterquestions, "What do you feel?"; and the cryptic answer establishes a bone-deep difference between the two men that totally belies a similarity of uniforms. John Saxon is excellent as the war lover, and Robert Redford digs beneath his own blond good looks to mine compellingly into the nature of goodness itself. While War Hunt is lean on frontline...