Word: lifes
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...being able now to refuse commissions as he pleases and to work only on what intrigues him. In recent years, he has found a new fascination in what he had scorned in his youth-the intricate drapery of classical Greece. Currently, he is occupied with three larger-than-life reliefs, first worked out in miniature and now being shaped in plaster in one of his two large studios set away from his house. For the routine modelmaking and preliminary shaping, he has two assistants, students who work for a year or two at modest pay to learn what they...
...finished piece under discussion displeases him. "It is simply too anecdotal, too sentimental," he says, and moves in the studio to a nearby figure, a more distorted yet far more powerful version of the same theme (see second color page, lower right). A woman almost bursting with the life of a new child? An earth bursting with spring? A moment swollen with the pain and hope of living? Were these what he was trying to convey in the figure...
...meaning of action marks every Hemingway hero, from the young American ambulance driver in World War I to the old fisherman, far out at sea, engaged in his biggest struggle. The same combination of events and commentary, held in exquisite balance, gives Shanti Andia the thrust of life itself at all its stages: the child's wonder at his discovery of sunlight on water, the youth's engagement in voyages, the old man's sad reverence for what is gone...
...truth sought by Shanti concerns the fate of an uncle, Juan de Aguirre, who like himself was a seafarer. Throughout the beautifully told story of Shanti's growing up and taking to the sea, fragments of the uncle's life, some contradictory, some provocative, come to his attention. Gradually, before the reader is fully aware of the change, the story has become that of Shanti's quest for his uncle. The mystery is eventually solved by a document written by the uncle himself. But by this time, Shanti and the reader are both well beyond the simple...
...probability or credibility in the modern sense. The plots are supported by coincidence, and the passage of years is treated as offhandedly as a spilled cup of tea. What makes them interesting centuries later is a mixture of lusty humanity and shrewd weighing of human nature, an awareness that life can be hard, balanced by an insistence that only virtue can make it tolerable...