Word: despairful
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...complicated and filled with absurdist characters. Across the Atlantic, Moby Dick has bombed as critics still have not settled the debate on whether the novel is a work of fiction or actually whaling industry propaganda. Van Gogh has already committed suicide, no doubt driven to such despair because he could only manage to sell one painting. Dickens, meanwhile, is derided as pop-trash in literary circles because his work is that which suits the half-educated moron...
...heroes. They continue now, everyday, to rebuild and regrow what I know will be a miraculous place, the new South Africa. I think South Africans there, and all over the world, have a unique perspective and a unique opportunity to build love and joy where there was sorrow and despair. It will take time, but I have great faith in the outcome. If "The Syringa Tree" can be a tiny part of a new message of hope and joy, I'm honored and deeply grateful...
...with patience and subtlety. A Taipei family tiptoes individually and together to the precipice of crisis: a father whose business needs a new-media fix from a Japanese swami (the marvelous Issey Ogata), a mother who seeks emotional solace in a Buddhist retreat, plus other hearts breaking from romantic despair or breaking down from old age. Opening with a wedding fracas and closing with a funeral, Yi Yi puts the trials of three generations delicately on view...
...cigarettes, excessive getting and spending. Drugs, naturally, are at the top of the hell list--they kill, they addle, they lie at the heart of a vast criminal enterprise, and the feckless "war" against them mostly wastes billions of public dollars every year. Traffic is the epic of our despair on this topic, an attempt to gather all the strands of the issue in one place and implicitly show how they entangle people at every level of society...
...quirks - a lifelong sense of alienation, insecurity and inferiority - to draw the real feelings of his life and time. He brought a spare pen line, Jack Benny timing and a subtle sense of humor to taboo themes such as faith, intolerance, depression, loneliness, cruelty and despair. His characters were contemplative. They spoke with simplicity and force. They made smart observations about literature, art, classical music, theology, medicine, psychiatry, sports...