Word: joycean
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THUNDER IN THE ROOM, by Harris Downey (205 pp.; Macmillan; $3), is a first novel which attempts a Joycean account of a day in the life of some citizens of a Southern capital, but often it seems more like a long afternoon spent in a botanical garden. From the very first page, when beautiful Stella Madden catches the delicate odor of spring, the prose thrusts up stalks of dracaena, carnations, ger-beras, tulips, coleuses, yaupon, oleander, jasmine, gladioli, magnolia and azalea. Even the characters come equipped with floral borders: Yancey, a condemned murderer, "clutches his hyacinth-red hair"; beautiful Stella...
...death of God," say France's existentialist intellectuals. "The problem of the aoth century is the death of man." Most of the writings of 50-year-old, Paris-dwelling Irish Expatriate Samuel Beckett (Waiting for Godot) are opaque obituaries of humanity. Written in a kind of Joycean code, they are further complicated by a neo-Cartesian quest for identity, the logic of which runs: "I cannot think and do not know, therefore I am-or am I?" In his play Waiting for Godot, this intellectual razzle-dazzle bewildered theatergoers, delighted highbrows and kept critics lunging desperately for underlying meanings...
...most people the mention of Finnegans Wake suggests a trackless forest of tangled Joycean jargon, huge, ambiguous, largely inexplicable, and hence poorly suited to stage production. But the present Poets' Theatre version proves that quite the opposite is true. Digging out some of the book's principal themes--not all, to be sure--and taking the best advantage of its circular form and the musical quality of Joyce's language, the Poets have arrived at a truly successful adaptation which never fails to be entertaining...
...biting off Finnegans Wake, the Poets' Theatre fortunately discovered that its eyes wee not bigger than its stomach. In fact, this choice offering of rich Joycean language should satisfy the most demanding of theatrical gourmets...
...duplicity in which the phonies have inherited the earth. Pronouncing a scarcely original, but nevertheless grandiose, anathema, he finds everyone corroded through the decline of love and the absence of Christian faith. Rangy in setting (New England, Greenwich Village, Paris, Spain, Italy, Central America), aswim in erudition, semi-Joycean in language, glacial in pace, irritatingly opaque in plot and character, The Recognitions is one of those eruptions of personal vision that will be argued about without being argued away. U.S. novel writing has a strikingly fresh talent to watch, if not to cheer...