Word: fabulists
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...terrific in his big comic set pieces (notably a decorum- shattering rendition of Good Golly Miss Molly at a royal ball). But even in those he avoids the temptation to broad farce. He and Ward trust themselves to go for something sweeter and more wistful, the tone of the fabulist, and they sustain it with near perfect pitch...
Neither version is completely true. More to the point, neither is dramatically convincing. The febrile mind and bodily functions of the famous dead are not off limits to a novelist, especially one of Garcia Marquez's talents. Yet in this novel his fabulist's imagination is overburdened by research. Historical names, dates and events frequently interrupt the mood that has been so carefully prepared to characterize Bolivar's last ride. True, Garcia Marquez unhorses a legend distorted by politics and patinaed by sentimentality, but Bolivar did a pretty good job of it himself. Schoolchildren may know him as the George...
...substantial battalion of devotees, Clive Staples Lewis -- the Christian apologist, children's fabulist and Oxbridge don who died in 1963 -- was a contemporary saint. His latest biographer notes with some bemusement that there is a kind of shrine to his memory at Illinois' evangelical Wheaton College: one of his old tankards is enclosed there in glass, like a relic. But difficulties face those who would canonize the author of Mere Christianity and the Narnia chronicles. A.N. Wilson, a British writer who has previously taken sensitive measure of Milton, Tolstoy and Hilaire Belloc, portrays Lewis as a blustery, hard-drinking eccentric...