Word: epics
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...masterpiece of the new manner, a book called simply V. (TIME, March 15, 1963), is an epic of planned irrelevance that Joyce would surely have respected. Unhappily, its successors have contributed little more than absurdity to the novel of the absurd. Constructed on the principle of free dissociation, they occasionally come off as hip happenings. More often, as lamentably illustrated in three novels published last week, they simply degenerate into glossolaliac gibberish...
BEAUTIFUL LOSERS, by Leonard Cohen (Viking; 243 pages; $5.75), is jacket-blurbed by its proud publishers as "a tasteless affront." They also call it "a religious epic of incomparable beauty," but they were right the first time. At its best, Losers is a sluggish, stream-of-concupiscence exposition of what Sartre called nausea. The flipster fictioneers have treated this theme so often that the method has become standardized: spit in their shoe, serve it to you. Novelist Cohen is all spit and no polish. His anti-hero is a Canadian writer who has had a homosexual affair with a Member...
...typhoon in which John Osborne's voice-splenetic, grieving and caustically humorous-is heard with more furious personal intensity than at any time since Look Back in Anger. As a defeated solicitor for whom life has become a playing field of pain, Nicol Williamson gives a performance of epic dimensions and phenomenal resourcefulness...
Technically, however, Matthew is not so stark. Just as the Bible makes poetry out of repititions which we might find intolerable in a secular epic, so this film establishes, and uses powerfully, three devices that might elsewhere seem annoying mannerisms...
Thus ended a frantic, seriocomic science-fiction epic that had strained Washington's relations with Spain, given Soviet propagandists a rich fallout of anti-American gibes, indelibly affected the life and folklore of thousands of Spanish campesinos and, by week's end, allowed the world at large its first peek at an H-bomb...