Word: metaphors
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Higgins is a B-grade writer with a weakness for overstretched metaphor: "Her dentures clattered like castanets on crusts of French bread," for example, or "popping back on her feet like a piece of bread from a toaster." He does have a fine ear for dialogue and a relish for tattletales that make Madame entertaining bathtub reading. If someone would do him the favor of stealing his dog-eared thesaurus, he might even make a good gossip columnist. ·Gerald Clarke
...brings Karin to his excavation to show off his prize, a centuries-old madonna, which is being consumed from within by mysterious insects that had lain dormant for 500 years and revived only when the figure was brought up from underground. It is an obvious and not especially felicitous metaphor for Karin herself. When the lovers finally part and Karin desperately pursues David to London, she meets his sister, a cripple suffering from an unnamed muscular paralysis, which she claims to share with her brother. Karin reacts to this as if it were a kind of sign (as indeed...
...Poets Unhoused. The certainties of language, like so many other certainties today, Steiner suggests, have become a privilege of the past. The Tower of Babel is once again an appropriate metaphor: "Increasingly, every act of communication between human beings takes on the shape of an act of translation." Our cultural anti-heroes are "poets unhoused and wanderers across language," contends Steiner, who is a cosmopolite himself, born in Paris of Austrian parents and educated in the United States as well as England...
Full Velocity. Two-Lane Blacktop does suffer from a certain overfamiliarity. After Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces and their sundry imitators, the American highway as a metaphor has become a pretty well-traveled route. But Two-Lane Blacktop is full of its own surprises. Rock Stars James Taylor and Dennis Wilson are fine as the Driver and the Mechanic: Taylor's gaunt face and haunted eyes and Wilson's strong, oblique presence suit Hellman's purposes perfectly...
Most important, Mann's treatment of the unconsummated affair of man and boy was a metaphor for Europe's decaying society. But Visconti takes the veneer and calls it furniture. With infinite tedium, he pores over every facet of Tadzio's Botticelli visage; with stupid distortion, he makes the boy, played by Bjorn Andresen, a flirt whose eyes flash a come-on to his helpless elder, like some midnight cowboy off the Via Veneto. He even concocts an elaborate bordello scene in which Aschenbach is shown as a heterosexual failure-a moment that proves as barren...