Word: fictional
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...best of them, but at the moment he is having fun being flippant about rock's old insistence on relevance. His tunes are elaborately homespun, lined with shifting, driving rhythms and coy harmonics, their lyrics full of flights of gentle, sometimes treacly fantasy. There are little science-fiction ditties and frequent paeans to Linda. Even during his Beatle days, McCartney was something of a sentimentalist, and not embarrassed about it. At this point in his development, he seems pleased to be a first-rate performer and a composer of clever songs. "People say the music...
...anyone managed to surmount these natural obstacles, there would be little enough to spy on. Mum might be cooking up a batch of her special pea soup (secret ingredient: sea salt), Dad might be settled back with some favorite reading material-science-fiction novels and comics, mostly. The whole family could be gathered around the table, enjoying a favorite meal of eggs and chips and larking about, hitting Dad for "requests"-everything from That Doggy in the Window to songs composed on the spot, to order, for whatever child does the asking. Dad may be working on the score...
...that account prospective buyers of The Company should beware. A Washington roman à clef it is; a full-scale Watergate book it is not. Ehrlichman is clearly using fiction as an extension of politics by other means; but his novel ends with word that a member of the White House staff has just been caught breaking into the headquarters of a Democratic candidate. The Company, in fact, bears the same relation to the final drama of Watergate that successive Shakespearean history plays bear to one another. There is some overlap. Dark deeds and blood feuds of the past rise...
...which many Americans can sympathize. The tendency these days is to assume that it does not matter what kind of book you write for money. Yet The Company, for all its diverting tidbits, should not be accepted (or dismissed) as good, dirty fun. In it, using a mask of fiction, the author continues with great tenacity and skill a campaign begun by the White House to vilify past Presidents and, indeed, American political institutions, so that Richard Nixon's behavior would seem less reprehensible by contrast. With that in view Nixon tried to declassify material to blacken Kennedy...
Carpentier returned to Cuba from Venezuelan exile in 1959, to join the Cuban Revolution. He worked as a cultural official and diplomat, and proclaimed his artistic program of rediscovering America as an act of revolutionary affirmation. Yet for several years, he published little fiction--it seemed that he was enshrined and preserved under glass, a model writer who wasn't writing...