Word: dead
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...NAKED AND THE DEAD (721 pp.)-Norman Mailer-Rinehart...
When Mattos Rodríguez died last week in Montevideo, at 51, Buenos Aires newspapers barely mentioned it, and the deadpanned dancers in the big, middle-class dance halls, in the low dives and tony boîtes did not even know that La Cumparsita's composer was dead. But their feet still followed his rhythms and their silent lips mouthed the lines...
...backs of pregnant women to help make their children beautiful, has the simplicity of a lollipop but the elegance of a Donatello; the yellow & black Ibibio carving, used in secret female dances, sits its crescent moon with awesome assurance; and the Mpongwe stilt-dance "Mask of the Dead" is ennobled, not coarsened, by its cruel tattoos...
...characters of The Naked and the Dead are the members of a platoon, six of them survivors of a rubber-boat disaster at Motome, wearied, embittered, haunted by a premonition of death, snarling about the newcomers and (occasionally) feeling a grudging responsibility for them, nervous, profane, lecherous. Their conversation is recorded with the fidelity of a recording machine. Indeed, it is almost too exact and too tough to be quite accurate...
...engineering, shortly after graduation married Beatrice Silverman (later a lieutenant in the WAVES). During the war he served in Leyte, Luzon and Japan, as a clerk, an aerial photograph expert, a rifleman in a reconnaissance platoon, a cook, a baker. Discharged in 1946, he wrote The Naked and the Dead in a year and a half...