Word: margarete
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
ENGLAND, the "noble and puissant nation" of Milton's poetry, is dying. As the characters in Margaret Drabble's The Ice Age grapple with the meaning of that decline, England's hard times--the "Ice Age" of the title--come to dominate their lives. IRA bombs explode, the economy stagnates and Drabble's heroes try to pick up the pieces. If most of them at the end are not much better off than when they started, the same happily cannot be said for the readers of this wry, compassionate, and suspenseful book...
...Margaret Drabble is not a Zen guru, a panderer, or a showman. She is a novelist. She does what the writer-as-artist can do better than anyone else: dig down to the truth of our inner lives and make it visible. The Ice Age is convincing evidence that, like England, the novel in modern times is not really dying, but undergoing a strange metamorphosis, from which it yet may rouse itself "like a strong man after sleep...
...Margaret Drabble...
Typically, Margaret Drabble's heroines have been wry, intelligent women pitting their vivid psyches against their drab or otherwise unsatisfying outer lives. Her eighth novel alters this formula. Characters, female and male, no longer have the luxury of pursuing self-fulfillment or fretting about personal unhappiness. They are too preoccupied with current events -with the drama of England's economic decline, featuring a cast of millions of involuntary bit players...
Never in U.S. history has a presidential relative engaged in such aggressively crass exploitation of a genetic coincidence. A couple of F.D.R.'s sons displayed a peculiar, almost prurient interest in their parents' personal lives, but only in books published long after Franklin and Eleanor had died. Margaret Truman's singing career might not have occurred without a father in the White House, but she earned painfully mixed reviews from it. F. Donald Nixon engaged in some murky financing on the strength of his brother's name...