Word: driftwood
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Judith Hearne is an old maid whose soul drifts like flotsam on a landlocked sea of Irish malice. It is the impressive feat of First Novelist Brian Moore, an Irish-born Montreal newspaperman, to compel the reader to follow the course of this human driftwood to its last miserable beach. Author Moore believes with G. K. Chesterton of his native city that...
...deftly understated handling, all that might be mawkishly sentimental in Andreas' goodbye to life develops instead the percussive pathos of Lear's grief-crazed cry over the body of his daughter, Cordelia. "Never, never, never, never, never!" Into this intense reverie of earthly leave-taking floats human driftwood from the general shipwreck of war. A cuckolded buddy runs his tongue over and over the story of his wife's infidelity with a Russian as if it were an empty tooth socket. A blond fellow soldier of eroded good looks reveals that a brutal sergeant seduced him into...
...still sleeps at his old house in Vallauris. At La Californie, Picasso has ripped out the connecting doors of the ground floor to make one huge studio. Pottery, sculptures, driftwood, rocks, paints, canvases, primitive idols, bottles and plain junk heaped here and there like the accidental deposit of a flood make the high, cool rooms seem homey to Picasso, who has much of Proteus about him. The only furniture thus far installed consists of some work tables, a few straight chairs and a rocking chair in which he reads his morning paper...
With exclusiveness, there is some snobbishness. The Association regards driftwood gatherers and mobile manufacturers as philistines, beyond the pale of true artistic production. The essence of the true art is its non-objectivity, in the intimacy between man and kobu. "In a kobu," comments the president," every man sees what he wants or needs to see. With us, there is no restricting canon of 'proper' taste or judgment...
...whaling ship today is a quite safe combination of floating factory and ocean liner, but in the 18th and 19th centuries, the world's most powerful animal was hunted down in ships so small that the whale could, and sometimes did, butt them into driftwood. In all man's hunting, none has been so downright risky and exciting. As a result, no true armchair adventurer can easily bypass a readable new book about whaling...