Word: homunculi
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Arthur Hailey writes holding-pattern prose. He advances one of his homunculi three-and-a-half pages toward ruin, then puts him in a holding pattern and moves some other character a totter or two toward temptation. But just before the dread jaws of fee-fi-fo-fum snap shut, there is another shift of attention, and the reader must tremble in behalf of a third wretch who has been circling perdition for two chapters, waiting for permission to land...
Sure enough, it squeaks through, and as the heart once more explodes into action the voyagers are hurled into even more photogenic adventures. To replenish their air supply, they snorkel through the gauzy wall of a capillary into a shocking-pink lung where the lightest breath hurls the homunculi about like twigs in a tornado. A bit later, the "foreign body" of Actress Welch is attacked with understandable enthusiasm by antibodies that look like jellyfish made of household cement...
Such a book cannot be dismissed by a shrug of criticism. But perhaps the best thing to do would be to remember the real children and forget the book's theological homunculi in their barbed-wire playpen...
...canvas are not enough: a novel end can apparently justify any means. Manolo Millares, 34, dips burlap into white paint, bunches and tears it, smears and daubs it with black. If he ends up with something vaguely resembling a figure, he calls it Homunculus, and some of his homunculi look rather like decayed and mangled ghosts. Antoni Tapies, 36, who abandoned the University of Barcelona law school to take up painting in 1946, heaps his canvases with paint, then gouges, cuts and scrapes. His Three Stains on Grey Space is exactly what it says-three blobs of thick paint placed...