Word: fictional
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...hallucinatory panorama of burning buildings, crossed telephone lines and panicky scrambles to get aboard any departing boat. It is a rich and poignant chronicle, and Farrell has researched it down to the last palm-oil statistic. If only he had been content to write history instead of fiction. For the book is not so much imagined as documented. Plot developments, like Singapore rickshas, serve to convey the reader from one exhibit to another. On your right are the rubber industry warehouses, repositories of greed; ahead is Chinatown; up the hill is Tanglin the English colony's surrogate Surrey...
...FICTION: Birdy, William Wharton Dubin's Lives, Bernard Malamud Sleepless Nights, Elizabeth Hardwick Good as Gold, Joseph Heller SS-GB, Len Deighton The Best American Short Stories 1978, edited by Ted Solotaroff The Flounder, Günter Grass
...that we saw the adolescent Antoine constructing a shoebox shrine to Balzac. Now in Love on the Run, we see Antoine working in a printing shop and writing books. Through his autobiographical persona. Truffaut speaks for all the children in the world who grew up living vicariously through fiction. Mixed-up, intellegent, creative. Antoine symbolizes the modern intellectual who spent his adolescence going to classical music concerts only to fall in love with the girl in the next aisle...
Sleepless Nights tosses and turns on such hard, solitary judgments. Mary McCarthy comes to mind and, oddly, so does the Ernest Hemingway of A Moveable Feast, who said that his book could be regarded as fiction though it also might throw light on autobiographical fact. Hardwick provides a similar safeguard when Elizabeth, her novel's unaltered ego, says to herself, "Why didn't you change your name? Then you could make up anything you like, without it seeming to be true when...
...reads and writes all day, has "the preoccupied look of a secret agent" and free-associates about Goethe with his psychiatrist. The author seems to have measured elements of Lowell very carefully, knowing that his specific gravity could easily upset the delicate balance of her fiction...