Word: dwarfed
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...World War I Paris. After experimenting with expressionism in a host of early, pessimistic poems and plays, Lagerkvist, who described himself as "a religious atheist," later developed the starker, more realistic prose style necessary to his vision of humanitarian idealism. In the U.S., he was best known for The Dwarf (1945), a bitter, allegorical novel about human greed, and Barabbas (1951), an enigmatic tale of man's struggle to achieve religious faith...
...Emigrants and The New Land. There was a certain stately glory to those works, a sense that Troell's pioneers were big enough to deserve the great country he seemed to perceive with a fresh eye. In Zandy's Bride the land is unfortunately allowed to dwarf the characters. · Richard Schickel
...Rubin shows considerable talent. Even so, the author wisely does not try to capture the war in its dreadful magnitudes of size and duration. He ambushes a piece of it from a Montagnard village in the central Vietnamese highlands, circa 1964, just before the machinery of destruction began to dwarf its human masters...
...17th century Italy. Their improvisations were passionate and bawdy, but so charming that even Church-supported French nobility were seduced into laughter. Impresario Flaminio Scala concocted such a dynamic group by painstakingly typecasting each member perfectly. So all they needed to do--Armanda the grotesque but sharp-witted dwarf, Pantalone the cross miserly Jew, Dottore the pompous doctor of quackery, Brighella the spiteful gadfly, and the others--was get up on stage and play themselves to the hilt...
...these intuitive and somewhat pat perceptions, nagging self-doubts dangle at the end of each memoir. But instead of developing their restive psyches, Prose disappointingly cuts the players short. Armanda the dwarf, for example, acknowledges the tension that arises from Flaminio's perfect typecasting, from his refusal to recognize her private soul. But the plot does not allow time for her to develop potential feelings of self-worth that can replace an identity culled from the glory of the stage. Instead, her memoir trails off in confusion, with a lame admission to Flamino that "I myself was never quite sure...