Word: lobsenz
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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VANGEL GRIFFIN (371 pp.)-Herbert Lobsenz-Harper...
There are pages and characters in Herbert Lobsenz' first novel (which won the $10,000 Harper Prize for 1961) that are not total losses. In Satry's brother Alonso. Author Lobsenz fashions a Don Quixote-cum-Candide whose pratfalls over the purity of his own logic attain a kind of tragic hilarity. Alonso is the puppet of his fate and a prototype of all the fanatically idealistic students who march and die in the streets...
Having lived in Spain in the mid-'50s. Author Lobsenz, 28, knows something of the parched, granitic harshness of the Spanish earth and the grave pride and passion of the Spaniard, and he conveys these with authority. Unfortunately, he lacks all control over his plot, and he makes most of his points by bending a reader's ear till it aches. After a flurry of melodrama, Vangel ends up with a whole new set of values. Here they are: "I would like to repeal suffrage for women. I would like to end all war. I would like...