Word: fictional
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...party representation in the Cabinet; the two groups had polled a mere 18% of the vote in last April's Constituent Assembly election, compared with 38% for the Socialists and 26% for the P.P.D. So tiny a fraction made a mockery of any M.F.A. attempt to maintain the fiction of democratic participation in the government. The M.F.A. thus swept out all representatives of political parties...
INVISIBLE CITIES is an allegory for the mind. Its language, imagery, patterns create a sense of grace and lyricism seldom found in modern realistic fiction, but the joys and the sorrows of this book are cerebral ones, except twice. Once, almost in spite of Calvino's coolly allegorical portrait, Marco Polo expands, just for a moment, into a human character. The emperor has asked him why, in all his tales, he never speaks of Venice, and the explorer responds in restrained, formal language...
...always tempting to try to find a connection between the artist's life and work, between the raw material and the finished product. Like any kind of analysis, this can easily be carried to dangerous extremes, but applied cautiously and selectively, it can add new dimensions to both the fiction and the reality. A dull life can be suddenly transformed through the prism of fine words and sensitive observations, or a Technicolor-surreal tale reduced to believable black and white when it is seen as a reflection of an actual incident...
...mocks the tragedy. The mixture of farce and drama that appears with a clear, sharp brilliance in Hellman's restrained prose looks gaudy on stage. Perhaps there are some things that, even if they are true, should not be put in plays, or short stories, or any kind of fiction. In this case at least, the raw material has a compelling directness, an understated honesty that has been lost in the transition to finished product...
...FICTION 1 -The Moneychangers, Hailey