Word: garnetts
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...David Garnett. 144 pages. Atheneum...
...classic, sends the imagination soaring far beyond its own spare telling. Thomas Mann got four dense volumes out of exploring the emotional and theocratic implications of a few chapters in the Bible describing Joseph's sojourn in Egypt. With less weight but more easy charm, British Author David Garnett has done the same thing with the story of Noah...
...Garnett's heroines are 14-year-old twin sisters, Fan and Niss, who have managed to stow away aboard the ark. Noah is a bearded, wine-guzzling patriarch who, during 20 years of building the ark, has never lost faith that he "walked with God." When the townspeople jeer him, Noah thunders: "God will sweep you all away, but He loves me and my children for we are His servants...
When it comes to literary name dropping, English Novelist-Critic David Garnett has practically no peers. At 70, he can look back to a childhood spent in the company of literary lights like Joseph Conrad, Henry James, "Jack" Galsworthy, Ford Madox Ford. His father was a prominent publisher; his mother Constance was the industrious translator who gave a whole generation of English readers the feeling that all the great Russians (Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky) wrote in the same curiously flat style. With such parental credentials, "Bunny" Garnett became almost automatically a charter member of the post-World War I Bloomsbury group...
...catches convincingly the style and tone of a generation of intellectuals who for a long period were certain that "the forces of intelligence and enlightenment were winning . . . that the dark ages were over." That spirit and that conviction did not survive the Depression, when, says Garnett, suicide became the rage in Bloomsbury. The writer Dorothy Edwards stepped in front of a train; the poetess Cynthia Mengs, who had been "trying to break her neck for years," managed it in a steeplechase; Dora Carrington, Lytton Strachey's longtime housekeeper and companion, shot herself and died with "a proud expression...