Word: life
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Adalen '31 is most deeply about the ineffable, invaluable quality of a single moment in the life of man, when a casual encounter or a supper at twilight is enclosed and enriched by the imminence of violent tragedy. Such scenes are framed in the shimmering light of a Swedish summer and seem idyllic, almost unworldly; but Widerberg handles the chaotic confrontation scene between workers and army troopers with a precise sense of brutality that proves that he is not entirely a romantic. The very gentleness and simplicity of much of the visual imagery-the names of Renoir and Monet...
...most people have only ambitions. With some fine adjustments for human limitations, Joyce Carol Gates demonstrates her intuitive grasp of this fact in Them, the latest novel in what has now become an informal trilogy about people's frantic attempts to free themselves from the complexities of American life...
...stepfather, who nearly beats her to death. The battering reduces the girl to a state of psychic numbness. When her will reasserts itself, she plots to seduce and marry a man "gaunt with normality," who already has a wife and three children. If she can't have a life transformed by love, at least she can have a house and family in the suburbs...
...finds it so, the author offers two creative precepts: "One has to be exhaustive and exhausting to really render the world in all its complexities and also in its dullness." And, "Gothicism, whatever it is, is not a literary tradition so much as a fairly realistic assessment of modern life." The assessment is based on six years of living and working in Detroit before she and her husband Raymond Smith moved across the river to Ontario, where they both teach literature at the University of Windsor. Detroit is Miss Gates' ideal American city...
...feels, confuses personal frustrations with public problems. A minor character in her latest novel defines the type perfectly. She has small patience, too, with intellectuals who find her work too full of social and economic themes. "The greatest realities are physical and economic, all the subtleties of life come afterward," she says. "Intellectuals have forgotten, or else they never understood, how difficult it is to make one's way up from a low economic level, to assert one's will in a great crude way. It's so difficult. You have to go through it. You have...