Word: deviousness
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...novels of Peter De Vries, life's devious ways have been crosscurrents in a happy sea of absurdity. In Comfort Me with Apples and The Tunnel of Love, adultery was the only way to hold a marriage together; there was power in futility, wisdom in platitudes and, of course, virtue in vice. But always there have been signs that inside the humorist, a serious novelist was struggling to get out. Now, in The Blood of the Lamb, absurdity becomes tragic, and De Vries says what has been on his lips all along: life is a joke...
...pages of cutlass work, the invading Spanish are contemptuously summed up: "They knew nothing of navigation. That they left to the Portuguese. When there was something to shoot, they shot it. When there was nothing to shoot, they prayed." The author admires the doomed Mayas, the soft, proud, cruel, devious fanciers of blood sacrifices. It is a measure of his skill that he persuades the reader to admire them...
Said Walker in announcing his candidacy: "National survival is the overriding issue. America's retreat, based on a no-win policy, has put this nation in dire peril . . . There is no hope in sight for relief from the devious feelers of machine politics. America is stronger than the thunder on the left would have us believe...
...momentary aberration. A self-styled "spiritual Socialist," he blamed his country's ills on the United Fruit Co., which had immense holdings in Guatemala, accused the U.S. Government of backing the company's "exploitations," once expelled a U.S. ambassador who offended him. In office, though a devious administrator, he gave his country some freedoms it had not known under a previous long line of dictators. The one party he refused to legalize was the Communist-but he did nothing to restrain the Communist clique behind gullible Army Colonel Jacobo Arbenz, who succeeded him as President...
RADITZER, by Pefer Motthiessen. The title figure of this unusual war novel is a devious sniveler who is an irritation and a danger to the men around him, but who, by a claim based subtly on weakness, is able to coax and goad an exasperated stronger man into protecting him. The ending is powerful, the entire book impressive...