Word: despairs
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Kenzaburo Oe was a child of 10 when World War II ended; occupying foreigners, ruins, humiliations and guilt filled the Japanese landscape of his adolescence. His early fiction and essays were unusually intense by Japanese standards, tinged with pessimism and despair. After 1963, when his first son was born brain damaged, Oe's work became even more personal; a helpless or deformed child figure recurs, suggesting both implacable fate and the possibility of redemption. Compared with the four previous laureates -- Octavio Paz, Nadine Gordimer, Derek Walcott and Toni Morrison -- Oe is little known but, thanks to the Swedish Academy...
...Mother has one other element that stamps it unmistakably as from another era. Though it ends on a superficially hopeful note, the emotional climax is the old woman's almost heartbreaking cry of despair in the penultimate scene: "I'm 66 years old, and I don't know what the purpose of it all was. An endless, endless struggle. And for what? For what?" Don't look for cries of existential anguish in today's prime-time dramas, where every story must be uplifting, and even bad things teach good people heartening lessons. The Mother is dated, all right...
...still waiting, or still failing without access to the reasons has become a salient point to legions of more or less listless young people. Antonioni offers no answers, and his attempts at tenderness are few and far between, but "L'Avventura" frames a vocabulary of a kind of despair, both poignant and banal, that can speak for a part of today's unnamed generation...
...Violence and crime happen when there's a feeling of despair, there's no hope, there's no opportunity for them," said New Bedford City Councillor David M. Gerwatowski. "If you create an opportunity for them to get jobs, then you'll help the crime here...
...sets the tone. It's a wary, weary kind of blues, and Clapton puts it over like a man groggy from an overdose of bad luck. By the time he reaches the album's midpoint, James Lane's Blues Leave Me Alone, Clapton has navigated the shoals of despair and is heading for very deep waters. There was a time when he practically lived at those longitudes,but like some explorer using charts from his first voyage, Clapton now tacks with more assurance. He knows the winds, and he's been through the storms before. They pass...