Word: elegiacally
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...second-act slump that lasts about three hours. But the best and the most of Berlin is the best that Fassbinder-or just about anyone else lately-has done. He balances the weight of Döblin's carefully repetitious dialogue with the buoyancy of his creamy, elegiac visual style. He interrupts the naturalism of lives on the skids with scenes of shocking surrealism: an old goat-man slaughters a calf; Mieze's corpse turns to soft-focus glitter, as if she had become in death a Hollywood star; a scorpion clambers up the entwined legs...
...Middle Ages, like A.R. Gurney Jr.'s other plays about the declining Protestant elite (Scenes from American Life, the current off-Broadway hit The Dining Room), is a wistful, elegiac comedy that preserves a tight-lipped emotional reserve: confrontations that could be tragic are played for rueful laughter. Unlike most of Gurney's other plays, however, The Middle Ages has a well-knit, symmetrical plot. It offers two love stories, a star-crossed one between a clownish boy and the girl who occasionally impels him to grow up, and another, almost accidental, between the boy's father...
DIED. John Cheever, 70, elegiac storyteller of suburbia; after a long illness; in Ossining, N.Y. (see BOOKS...
...rancher shakes his head. "A cattleman's word is as good as his bond. But the oilman thinks that breaking his word is smart business. He even admires it." One catches, yet again, a faintly elegiac note, the hint of mourning for a more chivalrous, manly order that is collapsing. Raising beef in a nation terrified of cholesterol does not always retain either its profit or its romance. The rancher wonders (as he has for a generation or two) if the endangered species is not the man who rides the horse. -By Lance Morrow
This first section of The Age of Wonders is a stunning novella, an elegiac distillation of incomprehension and loss. But Appelfeld then brings Bruno back, some 25 years later, to the same Austrian town. There has been a revival of interest in his father's writings, and the son is invited from Israel to assist in the arrangements for the new edition. This shorter episode raises questions that are not answered, including the fate of Bruno's parents and the means by which he escaped his own destiny on the cattle train. Also, the understandable passivity that Bruno...