Word: idyl
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Idyl's End. Author Cronin scarcely lives up to Herodotus or Hakluyt, for nowadays history is considered more "creative" if it is presented as fiction. Cronin has recast historic events in a form which the Persians call dastan, i.e., "near-factual history, almost myth." But the hero of this dastan will be remembered: Ghazan Khan, nomad chief of a tribe that Cronin calls the Falqani and a man hopelessly caught in the paradoxes of progress...
After Yom Kippur, $700,000. The idyl ended when the family moved to New York, and Bernie huddled with his brothers against the apartment chimney in the raw Northern winter and felt the first stings of anti-Semitism in neighborhood street fights. He dreamed of going to Yale, but Mamma Baruch would not hear of his leaving home, so he trudged 40 blocks a day each way to New York's City College. Ever mindful of the phrenologist's prophecy, his mother steered him toward the business world, and after his graduation in 1891 he found himself...
...Williams' attempt at a kind of outer and inner story-in his ferocious portrayal of a whole community's lynch-law intolerances that encircles his sordid, tense, sometimes maudlin idyl-there is more awry than a certain sprawl and shifting of tone. There is a real lack of causation and of vital connection; the destructive social forces never bear down honestly or even credibly on the personal tale. But here it is the social critic who helps lead the craftsman astray-the Williams who is obsessed with violence, corruption and sex, who sees life through a cracked glass...
...Idyl's End. There are quiet nights as the hunters sit silently with their rifles awaiting the antlered deer at a salt lick; they go spear fishing in the forest rivers, wake to brilliant mornings when billions of dewdrops shimmer like miniature suns, and huddle in the winter snugness of their clay-walled home with its roaring Russian stove. The climax of the year is the tiger hunt, when dogs and men go out to track down young cats and wrestle them into submission. And through this rhythmic cycle of the seasons, love springs up between Hryhory and Natalka...
...When the idyl is broken by the arrival of the NKVD major, Hryhory shoots the man dead and escapes to Manchuria and freedom with Natalka. The mythic and dreamlike quality of the book suggests that Author Bahriany may be more interested in symbolism than adventure. But his fine telling of man's struggle against nature seems more compelling than his deeply felt account of a freedom fighter's war with totalitarianism...