Word: lifeness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...SATISFACTION of reading a Henry James novel is seeing through eyes that penetrate the surface of Victorian manner and dress, and resolve scenes of human life into clearer images of human nature. The appeal is surely intellectual rather than emotional--the beauty of a James' novel is not so much in the characters' intrigues, but in the author's view of them...
...penetrating eyes--the filmmaker or even a character--who will transform the moving picture into insightful frames. In the film the most likely character to make such critical judgments is an old Bostonian, Mr. Wentworth (Wesley Addy), a father who sets the somber, reflective tone of his family's life. But he reserves and understates his opinions, narrating the actions of his European cousins more with his expressive eyes than with his voice...
Mavis Gallant. The name has a romantic ring to it, suggesting a pretty girl, sunlight on English countryside and happy endings, possibly during the Battle of Britain. But no modern writer casts a colder eye on life, on death and all the angst and eccentricity in between. A Canadian, Mrs. Gallant has lived in France since World War II. There she produces her lapidary long stories and an occasional dazzling short novel, usually set in Europe. Her work appears regularly in The New Yorker. Canada seems about to give her the Governor General's Literary Award...
...Moslem Wife is the life story of a woman hotel owner who survives the Occupation and then is importuned by her charming husband, who turns up after running off to America with another woman during the war. "Memory is what ought to prevent you from buying a dog after the first dog dies," she reflects. "It should at least keep you from saying yes twice to the same person." But she takes him back...
...good, or frowning on the bad more overtly. In truth, she mostly keeps her feelings protectively compressed behind an almost Conradian irony. Children, servants, old people draw her affection, partly because they are in a better position than the strong or successful to understand the real condition of life: that it is vulnerable to mysterious sudden changes, controlled by powers that the subject does not understand. Imaginative arrangements must be made, all of them temporary. "Gabriel at that time," Gallant writes about a young refugee in France, "still imagined that everyone's life must be about the same, something...