Word: mallet
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...ROOM (247 pp.)-Françoise Mallet-Joris-Farrar, Straus & Cudahy...
...fine points. These are at least as intricate as the fine points of, say, lawn tennis, though perhaps not quite as wholesome. One of the most elegant sportswriters of L'amour is a 26-year-old Flemish-born Parisian housewife and mother named Françoise Mallet-Joris...
What keeps The Red Room from becoming a sexual saturnalia is that it traces the contours of the heart as well as the flesh. Colette-like in its rhythms, Author Mallet-Joris' prose moves in sensuous counterpoint between "beauty, cruelty, voluptuousness and suffering, all equally delicious." What is not delicious about Hélène and what finally destroys her relationship with Jean is her feral determination to belong only to herself. Outwardly unmarred but inwardly depraved, she is a female Dorian Gray. But even with an unbeautiful soul, the game of love is scarcely over...
...idea may choose to 1) give the reader an intellectual hotfoot, i.e., singe his brain with a better idea, 2) tickle his funnybone with satire, 3) clout him over the head with the blunt instrument of anger. British-born Novelist Geoffrey Wagner belongs to the blunt-instrument school. His mallet of malice falls on psychiatry and especially psychoanalysis, its high priests, practices and pretensions. With scarcely a smidgen of saving humor, but with much righteous wrath, The Dispossessed argues that Freud, Jung, Adler, et al. are bloodletters of the psyche whose theories will eventually seem just as barbaric and outmoded...
Character Sculpture. Master dealer of identity cards is one Captain Mallet the guiding spirit of an extraordinary organization calling itself the Identity Club. Its members used to be mere psychoanalysts, but they have gone far beyond exploring the Self: they have learned instead, to supply their patients with "the identities they can use best." This crew moves into Hyde's Mortimer, an abandoned English country seat (it has lost its identity, too) for the club's annual convention. A task force under Captain Mallet recruits a domestic staff of local people. In almost no time, the frantic overworked...