Word: gothic
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What does the smile of the native optimist have to do with the groan from the cross? What cement will join a world of plastic to a world of Gothic stone? These are the persistent questions of J.F. Powers (Morte D'Urban), with Flannery O'Connor the finest American writer on Catholic themes. Powers' new group of short stories provides no answer, only a cosmic sigh...
Nearly all large-scale musical performance at Harvard is done in Sanders Theater, a building styled after a German Gothic cathedral, constructed to commemorate the Civil War dead. Plagued for almost a century by its non-functioning heaters in the numbing winters, super-retention of heat in the sweltering summers, and the perennial disturbance of sirens emanating from the fire station across the street, the otherwise perfect concert hall was shunned not only by performing groups, but kept audiences snug in the coziness of their homes and dorms while marvelous concerts were played to near empty houses...
...comprehend shame is uncertain. Yet Wolfs conclusion has some merit. Stoker, who was secretary to the actor Sir Henry Irving, shrewdly swotted Transylvanian geography and vampire lore at the British Museum reading room. His gleanings provided a European psychohistory before the term was coined, covering half-remembered terrors with gothic cobwebs. Stoker wrote several other romances of no particular power, but in Dracula he managed to create a classic, forever stalking his readers when their moral and rational defenses are down...
Despite its prodigious length, respectful traditionalism and grim high seriousness, The Surface of the Earth is so much shadowboxing with the ghosts of a gothic past. Price assembles as pallid a clan of relatives as ever sipped juleps on the veranda. The Mayfields and the Kendals are first yoked together in 1903, when young Eva Kendal elopes with Forrest Mayfield, her high school Latin teacher. Piqued, Eva's mother commits suicide and leaves her a nasty letter. A son, Rob, is born, and Eva trots back home with him to care for her father in North Carolina. Forrest stays...
...plowman conspire to give the novel its center and its soul. The lyricism cannot last. Mehring cracks up principally because the author must punish the undertow of racism that tugs at all his small virtues. To bring about the denouement, Gordimer resorts to a trick best relegated to gothic potboilers: the corpse that will not stay put. The body of a black man, apparently murdered, appears on Mehring's land. He has it buried. A flood brings it up again. The constant resurrection shatters the farmer. As the book ends, Mehring comes to understand that he can never possess...