Word: freude
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Paperback Freud. Rachel stands in the "exact middle" of her existence: she is 35. She is also at dead center, emotionally inert. Like a cold moon, she rotates around her widowed mother, reflecting all of Mamma's neuroses and ailments. When parents and children stay together too long, the relationship slips into reverse. Edging toward middle age Rachel becomes an adolescent. She seeks solace in masturbation, the first refuge of the child, the last hiding place of the isolated. Like a teen-ager making tentative explorations, she writhes with a suffocating guilt and murmurs to herself...
...live, can work, and can become better." The philosophy that Scientologists are taught is billed as a sort of religion of religions, combining parts of Hindu Veda and Dharma, Taoism, Old Testament wisdom, Buddhist principles of brotherly love and compassion, the early Greeks, Lucretius, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Spencer and Freud. Yet fundamental religious doctrines-the existence of God, for example-play no real part in the philosophy of Scientology, which is concerned solely with the here and now and is based on the twin principles that "man is basically good" and that "the spirit alone may save or heal...
...what gives the book its real fascination is its palpable authenticity. Behrman has collected people and experiences like a connoisseur. He has known the rich, the beautiful and the talented, and he appears to have put them into his novel as vividly and intimately as in a diary. Freud, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Arnold Schoenberg and Irving Thalberg make cameo appearances. Franz Werfel, Alma Mahler Werfel, Max Reinhardt, and several society beauties of the '30s are only slightly disguised. The author mocks, but he also burnishes his characters with an élan found all too rarely...
Unlike James Joyce, who refused to read Freud, or Dylan, who could not listen to Sgt. Pepper, novelist-essayist-poet and Joyce disciple Anthony Burgess has read everything. The prolific Englishman, author of thirteen books since 1949, has thrown it all into his latest tale of a lonely antihero dragging his dyspeptic way through the exoticisms of the Great Mundane. Burgess's greatest creation is Enderby, a wheezing, farting, belching bachelor poet who writes in the lavatory of his filthy flat. Enderby is a Mad Magazine version of Leopold Bloom; he sentimentally feeds gulls and innocently offends all the local...
...stepmother has given him. She has stamped her foster-son with her filthy habits and enforced his life-long retreat to the lavatory. From her come the whole slew of Enderby's neuroticisms, from his fear (cropping up in the author's other books) of lost teeth (according to Freud a fear of castration as punishment for masturbation) to his repugnance for Mother Church...