Word: joylessness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...GIANT DWARFS, by Gisela Eisner. A bitterly effective indictment of the Nazi era and the new materialistic society that succeeded it. Through the eyes of a brilliant child, this young German novelist depicts a family's joyless, all-consuming pursuit of money and respectability at the cost of human feeling...
...18th novel, accurately describing the way time has passed for his characters, and for the reader, in the preceding 398 pages. Banality is what Farrell's novel is about, and it is also the novel's sole literary device. The people of the book are joyless, hateless, empty of good or evil, fleshy machines that transmit at the audible level the prattle of Babbittry and, octaves above, the silent scream of tedium. The prose in which they are described is also joyless and hateless, empty of merit and of error, painfully boring. And it is obvious that this...
Sublime Chaos. By contrast with the cock-a-hoop mood of a few years back, most Russians now seem bitterly resigned to the shortages, discomforts and joyless conformity of life as they now know it. In the cities all winter, housewives have had to wait interminably in line for potatoes, macaroni, flour, coal and coarse, gritty brown bread; in some areas, where bread ran out, they have heeded Marie Antoinette's apocryphal advice and queued for cookies and cake instead. Asked recently how he thought 1964 would turn out, one Muscovite replied dryly: "Worse than 1963, but better than...
...discomfited even as he clambers aboard the homebound liner and begins sadly to plot the next tack in his joyless rakery among available shipboard quail. The very worst kind of American bore descends upon the defeated hero to claim him as the right kind of guy to save a boat trip from being a real drag...
...argument should be clear by now. The Deans should be answered through letters couched in terms of warmth, joy, humor, perspective, and love. Rather than discussing sex at Harvard, we should discuss why Harvard is often joyless, pompous, cold, and frantic. The real scandal occurs not when a Harvard man seduces a 'Cliffie, but when he is ashamed to say "I love you" because it is not cool, and when he is afraid to express warmth because it is naive...