Word: fastnesses
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Torquemada, Howard Fast has reached back 500 years to compose a bitter fictional parable about one of the most detested figures in the history of man or of man's religion-the Dominican Friar Thomas de Torquemada, Prior of Segovia and Grand Inquisitor of Spain. Or so it seems. A parable illuminates a complexity with a single truth. Fast's is a terrible, simple tale which raises more complex questions than it provides simple answers...
...knight who has fought the Moors, assures the Queen that the earth is indeed round like a ball. The King, however, turns down Columbus on the grounds that 1) the earth is flat, and 2) Columbus is a Jew. Actually, Columbus was not Jewish, but for some odd reason Fast does not bother to enlighten the King or the reader...
...peculiarly simplistic fashion-costume-drama style minus costume-designed to give somnambulistic inevitability to the dreadful action. The hypnotic effect may not take in some readers who will be irritated by the tones of an adult careful not to use big words to a low-IQ child. Moreover, Fast's publishers call Torquemada a tour de force; it could also be a sleight of hand. How it is read probably depends on how much the reader knows of history, not excluding the history of Howard Fast...
Commissar. In seeking an ogre in history, Historical Novelist Fast (Citizen Tom Paine) need have looked no further than the man in whose honor he was given the Stalin Peace Prize in 1953. But perhaps a contemporary fable would be too painful for Fast. He was an unswervingly militant card-carrying Communist and something of a culture commissar for Communism. Himself a Jew, he became anti-Stalin and quit the Party only when he discovered that Stalin was anti-Jew. This underlies the special weakness of Fast's tale. In fashioning Torquemada as a demented racist and centering...
...adult horror comic; he made his book a classic defense against the ogres of absolutism who think that their political faith gives them power over the minds and bodies of other men. Koestler brought a better mind to the subject; he began by renouncing the inquisitor within himself. Fast's book is no more than a tua culpa. In the person of Alvero, he seems to be trying to recover in the 15th century the innocence he lost in the 20th...