Word: deadness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Poisoned Darts. Anouilh's hero, Antoine de St. Flour, is dead when the curtain rises. A famed French playwright who retired from the world to a Bavarian Schloss on his 50th birthday, he has been killed in a shotgun accident that may have been a suicide. A group of characters from his past have been summoned for the reading of the will. They make up a nicely varied assortment: two ex-wives-one of them an old dreadnought of an actress superbly played by Françoise Rosay-three mistresses and three men, including a dyspeptic theater critic, jealous...
...third act is an epilogue in which a plaque is unveiled in honor of the dead playwright, who has presumably gone to the grave without revealing the existence of his last prophetic play. The dialogue rains poisoned darts on love, marriage, friendship and bourgeois values, making Cher Antoine a precision-tooled piece of lapidary Gallic...
...autobiography is complete unless its writer arranges to fall dead across the last page of corrected proofs, and Lind's account is no exception. But the book has a certain unity. At the end, young Lind has fled and fumbled his way backward from extinction to his tribal beginnings, and is now as ready as any two-year-old to start life...
...best. A fantasy involving late medieval Cornwall and Kilmarth, a house in which Daphne du Maurier lives, the book shrewdly borrows an old device to exploit the current literary craze for communication with the dead. Richard Young, a suggestible publisher, is persuaded by a scientist friend to be guinea pig for his latest discovery: a potion which abruptly evokes the past. One sip puts Young in the company of Roger Kylmerth, an early occupant of Kilmarth, who is immersed in the intricate plottings of the neighboring gentry and even a national struggle between partisans of Edward III and England...
...fact it will be the constant in our lives-the taste of dampness like stale cigarette smoke in the morning, the dead leaves in the Common like soggy Wheaties underfoot, the chill that seeps under doors, permeating our clothes, our sheets, our skin. But the sound, most of all, will pervade existence; it will be the insistent insidious counterpoint to clammy kisses and perspiring embraces, to lectures and marches and meals, until we find ourselves praying for a cataclysm, an orgasmic deluge to end the monotonous drizzle...