Word: fiction
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...FICTION...
...pure. To bend them is to break them; to lend them warmth is to make them lose their integrity. Even Welles has been unable to fashion more than a laborious, misshapen exercise. The reasons are obvious. This is his first film in color-an inappropriate mode for a fiction written in etched, formal prose, devoid of the sensual palette. Secondly, because the movie was made for television, its time is arbitrarily restricted to an hour-too protracted for spare storytelling and too limited for character development. The most grievous flaw is the choice of the story itself...
...powerfully conceived, expertly executed traditional story about a Siamese twin who believes that his brother is planning to kill him. By turns funny and pathetic, it shudders with the paranoia that ensues when one loses his sense of humor about an unalterable condition. Title is an experimental fiction that is the last word in self-consciousness as a literary mode. The protagonist is the story itself, continually stumbling over its own beginning, middle and end, and recovering to see if anybody is still watching. "To acknowledge what I'm doing while I'm doing it is exactly...
What Barth is really up to can perhaps best be seen-or rather heard-in Glossolalia. He uses the mystical notion of speaking in tongues as a pointed metaphor in his guerrilla war against static literary forms. More a soothsayer's scripture than prose fiction, the piece mimics the ancient ritual that attempts to divine the truth with spontaneous word patterns and nonsense syllables. Concludes Barth: "The sense-lessest babble, could we ken it, might disclose a dark message, or prayer...
...that he is mellow, fulfilled and nearing 80, Conrad Richter is devoting his fiction more and more to recollections of the kind hearts and sometimes genteel people who lived in the town where he grew up, Pine Grove, Pa. (pop. 2,267). He has written three books about the mores of "Unionville, Pa.," Pine Grove's fictional counterpart, and they are, for the most part, splendidly solid. His latest, alas, is not. The Aristocrat is slender and seemingly self-indulgent. It would be slick as well, were it not for Richter's imperturbable sincerity. He presents a caricature...