Word: haras
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Once morbid Japanese ripe for Death would dispatch themselves with a dagger, elaborately disemboweling themselves in a ritual of exquisite pain. Today such heroic acts of hara-kiri ("belly-cut") are rare. Suicide has gone cheap, and last week Japan's go-getting suicide tycoon, owl-eyed Jinnojo Hayashi, scored another coup. For the second time this year sensation-hungry tourists at his Suicide Point witnessed a triple plunge into the sulphur-stinking maw of Death...
...characters. It is, at any rate, a favorite one with modern novelists: Joyce has used it. Whole books have been written by his imitators (Mr. Aiken, for example) in which the principal character hardly gets a chance to live, so busy is he kept recalling childhood experiences. Mr. O'Hara, in Appointment in Samarra, has employed this technical device to explain the temperament of his hero, Julien English. And here is Victoria Lincoln, following along in what is, by now, a well worn path. Her novel would have suffered little by the omission of Vergil Harris' reveries...
Italians call their present Chamber of Deputies the "Hara-kiri Chamber" because it is slated to commit suicide at II Duce's invitation and be replaced by either the small National Council of Corporations or the large General Assembly of the Corporative State. Since Mussolini was believed to favor the Council, there was a rustle of Fascist surprise last week when he seemed to destine the Assembly to succeed the Chamber of Deputies. "This Assembly," said Il Duce, "will substitute for another institution which belongs to a phase of history now relegated to the past...
Presented is the city of Gibbsville, Pa. (pop.: 24,032), battening on the anthracite coal industry at a time when the Depression was called the Slump. In a story of only three days, John O'Hara succeeds in covering as much ground about Gibbsville as Sinclair Lewis did in describing Gopher Prairie (Main Street) in three years. He writes with swift realism, wisely avoids sentimentality...
Author John O'Hara, 29, is a rolling stone who has travelled from his hometown Pottsville, Pa. Journal to the Paramount studios in Hollywood. He has contributed stories to The New Yorker, Scrib- ner's, Vanity Fair. "In addition," he says, "I have jerked soda, worked on two railroads and in a steel mill, on an ocean liner and a farm . . . bummed east and west, was a day laborer. I was married once. ..." Appointment in Samarra is his first novel. A volume of his short stories, The Doctor's Son, will be published this autumn...