Word: fictional
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...where a shaky totem like Tommy could attract such worshipful respect. Tommy shares with traditional operas a foolish libretto, this one having to do with a deaf, dumb and blind boy who becomes a pinball champion, a culture hero and a new messiah. Townshend wavered crazily between satire, science fiction and sanctimony; Russell mocks the very seriousness of the piece itself by focusing on, then extending it. The movie is entirely sung; there is no dialogue. But there are several added narrative fillips and some lavish production numbers whose very excess is their own meaning...
...contemporaries labeled him "a political Jules Verne." The term was pejorative; Verne, after all, was producing outlandish fictions about lunar voyages and undersea exploration. Theodor Herzl was even more absurd. He helped create Zionism and predicted the return of the Jews to their homeland. Yet the comparison with Verne was more than superficial. Both men began as romantic visionaries who sought careers in law, then in the theater, then in literature. Verne went on to science fiction; Herzl went on to Palestine. That bizarre journey has all the qualities of fin-de-siècle romance. It might have been...
Burn all high school yearbooks, tell loathsome lies to old roommates who telephone after 20 years, on pain of black despair avoid sentimental journeys to childhood beer gardens, and never, never reread Look Homeward, Angel. But here comes Science Fiction Writer Ray Bradbury's magical boyhood novel Dandelion Wine, republished in a new edition after 19 years. Is its magic powerful enough to make it young again, or is its neck corded and scrawny in the collar of that new dust jacket...
Harvey Swados finished Celebration shortly before dying of a brain hemorrhage three years ago at the age of 52. The novel has the virtues one cherished in Swados' fiction: decency, compassion and a gentle wit. Yet the book suffers from what was always Swados' noble flaw as a novelist: a talent never quite up to the demands he put upon...
Celebration combines all the elements that should produce readability and substance in fiction. Sam Lumen's secret diary is told in the form of mixed memories, snatches of dreams and unsentimental musing about old age. But the clash of ideas, between old and new radicals, for instance, never reaches higher than Lumen's easy parries of nihilistic rhetoric. Above all, Sam Lumen's eminence is never convincing...