Word: fictional
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Great American Theme flourishing in recent film and fiction concerns the menopausal U.S. male who seems to be burdened by mortgages, a dismal sex life and fallen arches. This sad creature takes the holiday of his dreams, literally, combining hunting and fishing with other manly pursuits, e.g., rape, torture, kidnap and/or murder. Optional extras are sexual deviation, castration and severe mutilation, variously featured in such creations as James Dickey's Deliverance and David Osborn's more recent novel Open Season, a dreadful account of three top Detroit executives who each year put a man and a woman...
Blotner's dedication to trivia, however, has unearthed information that sheds light on Faulkner's fiction. An early jotting regarding Absalom, Absalom! reveals that Faulkner was concerned more with the way his different narrators--especially Quentin--obtain their information about Colonel Sutpen than he was with the Sutpen story itself. The young Faulkner's correspondence with Sherwood Anderson records an amusing fantasy world of swamp animals they created...
Faulkner's mysterious life was more than a mere succession of facts, making him prime material for a psychological literary biography. Faulkner insisted that uncovering personal facts would merely invade his privacy and would not provide a key to his fiction. His works (with the exception of Mosquitoes) are not directly autobiographical, but rather imaginatively derived from the totality of his experience. Like James he regretted that letters lived on as a record of his private life, and tried to have them destroyed. But whereas Edel gives details on James only as they relate to the life of the mind...
...first-rate novelist himself, Malraux confided that he is no longer writing fiction. "Of the great novelists of my generation," he asks, "who is? Hemingway did not finish his last novel. Gide did not write a real novel in the last ten years of his life. Sartre abandoned the novel. So have...
Which way will we go? The author opts for evolution. While such optimism is as welcome as it is rare these days, it is largely based on mysticism and intimations of a "new planetary culture," which Thompson shares with Philosopher Teilhard de Chardin and Science-Fiction Writer Arthur C. Clarke. This is thin epistemological ice even for a skater as fast as Thompson. Indeed, incredulous readers may drop the book after the first reference to "our lost cosmological orientation." That would be a mistake. Agree with it or not, Passages is always fascinating, a magical mystery tour...