Word: lesson
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...downfall of Venezuelan Dictator Marcos Perez Jimenez last week drove home a lesson: prosperity is no substitute for liberty, and even the best-fed men will fight for freedom...
Sooner or later the genuine novelist discovers that his bread and butter depends on the quiet desperations that lie imbedded in the lives of most men and women. How he handles them is one measure of his worth. Texas-born William Humphrey, 33, has learned his lesson early. Alongside a fine book of short stories (The Last Husband and Other Stories), he can now place a first novel that shows how extraordinary the ordinary can be. Home from the Hill tells a story that will be largely familiar to every small-towner. What takes it well beyond village gossip...
Author Sansom has learned the lesson of V. S. Pritchett that the proper study of British fiction is class. One of the best stories in this collection is set in Venice and is strongly reminiscent of theVenetian episode in Lady Chatterley's Lover. Like D. H. Lawrence, Sansom plays his defunctive music undersea on the G string of sex, but class composes the melody. In this case, a gondolier rashly falls in love with a beautiful English girl whose snobbery is so intense that it simply does not occur to her that a mere gondolier could aspire...
With The Chairs and The Lesson, Rumanian-French Eugene Ionesco, whose work has been about equally hailed for its meaning and hooted for lack of any, had his first professional Manhattan hearing. In The Chairs, dubbed "a tragic farce," an aged couple who live in a sort of wave-washed fortress give a party for a horde of guests who are only so many chairs. After the old man (Eli Wallach) has delivered a "message" about the world, he and his wife throw themselves into the water. Swimming in symbolism, The Chairs readily enough suggests people's enisled fate...
...Lesson, a mad professor harangues and finally kills an odd, 17-year-old student (played as winningly by Joan Plowright as she plays the 94-year-old wife in The Chairs). The play perhaps symbolizes how pedantry destroys individuality, but like so much anti-academic satire, runs to academic jokes. Ionesco's seems an agreeable but thin talent, with a kind of philosophic-puppet show appeal...