Word: joylessness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Wagner's plot. Though the composer grandly pronounced Tristan "the greatest musical drama of all time," opera houses in Dresden, Berlin, Vienna and Munich rejected it as "unperformable." Moreover, to a public reared on Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti and Meyerbeer, most of Wagner's works seemed to be joyless monstrosities...
...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...