Word: languid
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
HERE IT IS: the book to illustrate the pictures in Life magazine. You remember those pictures: dormitory rooms sprinkled with brown-haired boys in crewneck sweaters and blue-eyed blondes stamped with ennui, their languid bodies frozen in glossy color, their fingers fading off into wisps of smoke. And you remember Life, the magazine which did for dope what the New York Times did for Charles Reich. But perhaps you weren't satisfied by Life. Or Look. Or Time or Newsweek or the Reader's Digest. Perhaps you want more...
...clear, serviceable prose, less careless than Agatha Christie's and less precious than Dorothy Sayers'. It must be said, though, that Mr. Campion began life in The Black Dudley Murder (1928) in unblushing imitation of Sayers' rococo creation, Lord Peter Wimsey. Both were lean, languid young noblemen who spoke in the high whine that Waugh classified as the British upper class baying for broken glass. Both concealed great skill and cunning behind a facade of graceful, gratuitous vagueness...
...began my journey by following Dr. Houston's instruction to imagine myself lying in a boat on a wonderfully hot, languid July afternoon, lazily floating past meadows lush with trees and flowers, the whole scene suffused with silence and peace and the prospect of wonderful things to come. I was completely conscious of the chair in which I sat, of the room and its surroundings and of Dr. Houston, but at the same time the experience of being in that boat was as vivid as if I were in a waking dream. Never at any time in the next...
Frantic and Languid. Armah's fiction is stiller and clearer. His second novel, Fragments, is set at a lower voltage than The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, his first novel about the failure of revolution to inspirit his fellow Ghanaians. But contempt for his countrymen still seethes, this time because they are corruptly devoted to cars, tape recorders and neon "WELLCOME" signs at airports. Baako, his fragile hero, cannot adjust to such trinket worship. His sister's premature baby dies when the family too quickly presents it at an outdoor festival because they are anxious...
Oppressed by such signs of avarice, Baako's mind cracks in a long, brilliant scene that is at once frantic and languid. Armah unwinds the entire story slowly, circling the fragments of Baako's breakdown with the sureness of an African tribal dance that seems always on the edge of monotony, yet is continually closing on the climax. For Baako, too, there is a circling. First he approaches nearer and nearer to a knowledge of what lies at his center of being. Then he is literally and figuratively encircled by others like a mad dog. In an Ibsenian...