Word: grass
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Feasts & Magic. The grass-roots Mahayana Buddhism in the Viet Nam villages is a long way from such grim practices. It usually takes the form of the easygoing Amidism, in which a paradise called "Pure Land" awaits the intense faithful who repeats a simple prayer. It is strongly influenced by the magical practices of corrupted Taoism, imported from China around the 7th century, and by Confucianism, which stresses ethical behavior...
Prayers of Praise. Grass's bizarre title is an invitation to read his book as a restricted fable for two-the cruel cat of collective human conformity endlessly toying with the mouse of an individual's deformity. But Grass has set the jaws of his literary mousetrap much wider than that. Just as a straight chronicle of the sometimes nasty habits and high hopes of boyhood, his story should become a minor classic like Kipling's Stalky & Co., Alain Fournier's romantic pre-World War I The Wanderer, and John Knowles's A Separate Peace...
...MOUSE, by Günter Grass. 189 pages. Harcourt, Brace & World...
Like many another European writer who grew up under Adolf Hitler, German Novelist Gunter Grass, 36, is a man shadowed by the cruelty and grotesquerie of life. The groans and squeaks, the howls and primitive chuckles of his first hero, a prurient dwarf named Oskar Mazerath, made Grass's The Tin Drum the most powerful first novel to come out of Germany in a generation...
...second book Grass has turned to another grotesque-a gawky adolescent named Joachim Mahlke who is afflicted by a quivering excrescence of flesh over his Adam's apple. But if Grass still views life largely as a kind of Gothic sideshow, he permits himself, as he did not in the earlier book, a saving touch of human compassion. As a dwarf who had seceded from the adult world in order to survive in it, Oskar remained a skeptical spectator of absurdity. Through the muted and melancholy chronicle of Mahlke's brief life, Grass seems to say that deformed...