Word: idiot
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...Muir's first novel has something of the structural development of a fugue. Its main theme is the simple story of Hans, an idiot boy, who at first is feared and loathed by Martin Scheffer, his father, but when Emma, the nurse, undertakes to bring the two together on the occasion of the child's fourteenth birthday, there is an ensuing successful rapport, and she loses hold over her old charge. But this strain is supported by the introduction of a supplementary force, for Hans sees the marionettes play Faust, and these dolls soon people his world, absorb his life...
...Muir's analysis of the idiot's mind is more intense than the acuteness of a clinical report, for he sharply transmits to the reader the emotional reaction to large events, strained through a limited but unimpassive consciousness. He has maintained a changing balance of domination in the wills of his characters, and the movement of successive mutations of superiority and inferiority mark the progressions in the plot. Mr. Muir's psychology, symbolism, and philosophy are inextricably dove-tailed, while the constant flux of affirmation and negation in the mind of Hans may be capable of many interpretations. There...
...idiot lemner's vain attempt deride...
...various shapes and sizes, uniformly brainless except Pyotr's mother-in-law, who became his father's mistress; a pink-faced carpenter, a philosophizing ancient and that creature as indispensable to a Russian novel as are bobbed hair and bachelors to the Saturday Evening Post-the village idiot. But Author Gorky's powers, however fully displayed here, have produced books that were far more readable than this one. The action and atmosphere of Decadence are typified in a single meteorological description from it: "During the daytime an opal cloud of acrid smoke rose in a column above...
...injia-rubber idiot on the spree...