Word: lifeness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...most fantastic and bizarre imagination of any American writer. Lurid episodes splatter his pages, rapes of village nymphs by jealous peasant women with rake handles and broken bottles and remote-control murders on Swiss ski slopes. Yet if People can be trusted, Kosinski's tales are more life than art, drawing on a misguided, exotic youth...
Most of Fabian's sex occurs inside his VanHome, a monstrous mobile house of a half-dozen rooms, among them a tack room, skylit bedroom, and stable for his horses. The VanHome and the strange sex that goes on inside it leap out as symbols of the way of life Kosinski's characters have always sought. The impregnable quality of the VanHome, its mobility and completeness, match the character of its driver. Like the sex in his bedroom, Fabian burns wildly passionate on the inside. But like the cool metal walls of the VanHome, his shell is unforgiving...
...this fact torments him. He sees middle age in every mirror. When his body does fail him, his passionate courtship of polo will end. Without the opportunity to excel, without the ability to mount a pony and fly victorious across a manicured field, without all this Fabian's life need not continue. Hence, the books Fabian has written (he too is an author) warn of the dangers of horsemanship--there's no blithe extolling of the joys of riding here. Indeed, Kosinski--Fabian's creator--himself carries poison with him at all times so he can abruptly kill himself should...
...more method to the madness of human grotesquerie that has always decorated his pages. Kosinski writes about the dark shadow self--our violent urges, homosexual lusts, transexual curiosities, murderous inclinations, heterosexual explorations, and, inevitably, our intense fear of surrendering control of the flesh and bones that give us life. None of these themes is new to Kosinski; what's new is the lucidity and restraint with which they're developed. Passion Play is his best novel...
...children with midnight visits from the Pope if they didn't behave. Now these threats are coming true and descendants of these Calvinist matrons will vie with each other for places along Boston's own Via Papale. Two remarkable Bostonians should have lived to see this day. Antagonists in life, on this day they would have been as one: William Henry Cardinal O'Connell, Boston's ultramontane Cardinal Archbishop, and The Honorable James Michael Curley, Boston's irrepressible mayor and one-term governor of Massachusetts...