Word: humorless
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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LADY L., by Remain Gary. A relatively slight and urbane book, but one that the year needed. The British lady turns out to be a reformed French prostitute, and her old anarchist lover is cast as Author Gary's target: a handsome, humorless fellow so bent on saving humanity that he forgets the nature of humans and their occasional indisposition to be saved...
Further, while "antiseptic and astringent criticism of the form of Christian affirmation" leads to clarification, it also brings about a "humorless constriction of the very terms it brings under analysis." In short, said Sittler, the context of confirmation is the "massive and organic story of man--in his analysis and anguish, his vision and his dread, his lusts, longings, loves, and loneliness...
...four in plastic clothesline and departed in Poet Engle's clothing and his station wagon. The Engles quickly freed themselves, and both fugitives were rounded up next day. Complained their involuntary host: "They were completely devoid of a sense of humor." But Poet Engle, far from humorless, is now, according to his friends, perfectly situated to write a farce version of The Desperate Hours, presumably with some very realistic Ransom of Red Chief overtones...
...underexposed snapshot." His family life is equally shadowy: his first wife "died" in 1945; his second is described as a "handsome" woman from Tientsin. One of his four sons was executed by the Kuomintang; a daughter went to school in Moscow and married a Spanish Communist. Sharp-tongued and humorless, Liu Shao-chi has flicked a raw spot on nearly everyone around him. When Premier Chou En-lai suggested in a speech that no one could be considered faultless, he was forced to admit that "Chairman Mao and Comrade Liu Shao-chi and a few other leaders have achieved...
...novel's hero is a young St. Petersburg philosophy student, Nikolai Apollonovich, who has got mixed up with a seedy revolutionary gang and has committed himself to planting a bomb. The trouble is that the target is his own father -an elderly, rich and humorless bureaucrat just below Cabinet rank and a champion of the Czarist regime. His much younger wife has left him; his son despises him, and most people fear him, actually, he is a harmless little man whose sole commitment is to the civil service. But it is 1905 and Russia has just taken a beating...