Word: gnomic
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Item: Umberto Eco's gnomic, daunting Foucault's Pendulum, published in the fall, got off to a fast start with 278,161 sales...
...prose is strikingly gnomic as Langley tells of her past and future. But the consistent tone masks an impatience with novelistic invention. Much of the novel reads like a catchall of California behaviors and the confessional sociology that passed for journalism in the '70s. Sometimes See is right on the money: "I don't remember Jack very well at all. And we were married five years! He hated the way I held hamburgers." But there is not enough of this to pass for serious fiction...
...semireverent homages, he took them as his due without interesting himself much in their paintings. He patted the Young Turks on the head, telling Picasso, for instance, that the two of them were the greatest artists of their time, "You in the Egyptian style, I in the modern." This gnomic utterance can only mean that Rousseau identified "modernity" with the salons: it was official speech, like the Eiffel Tower...
...teen-age spirit over adversity. Like Rocky, it offers the spectacle of a young man punishing his body in order to aquire the skill and toughness to win a big fight against long odds. Like "the Star Wars saga, it provides him with a Yoda-like mentor full of gnomic instruction and inspiration in his struggle against evil. In short, The Karate Kid presents the smallest imaginable variations on three well-tested formulas for movie success...
They needed whatever friends they had. The gnomic initials P.R.B., appended without explanation to their signatures in the 1850s, had the combined effect on many critics of a red flag and a leper's bell. "Monstrously perverse," was a typical comment. "Plainly revolting," was another. Charles Dickens, no less, saw "a hideous, wrynecked, blubbering, red-haired boy in a nightgown, who appears to have received a poke ... and to be holding it up for the contemplation of a kneeling woman, so horrible in her ugliness, that she would stand out from the rest of the company as a monster...