Word: mordantly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...skills-how to avoid being cheated, how to cross borders. They come back in a daze of wonder. But even today's writers who travel are remarkably good: Paul Theroux (The Great Railway Bazaar), Edward Hoagland (African Calliope), Jonathan Raban (Old Glory: An American Voyage) and the splendidly mordant V.S. Naipaul...
Like father, like son? The question barely survives the interruptions from the author's richly mordant characters: Dutch's lover, Judge Martha Sweeney, who kept her virginity until she was 31 and wears a .38 under her judicial robes; Father Hugh Campion, a "celebrity priest" who won $100,000 on a quiz show and went on to star in Father Hugh's Kitchen, "the highest-rated cooking program on the air"; Private Detective Marty Cagney ("Discreetly determining what was done-where & with whom"), who compiles the adulterous dirt on Dutch's exwife; Cagney's daughter...
...More in A Man for All Seasons. For the first time, Spelvin is more than baffled. He feels a chill of apprehension, and rightly so, as he hears the stage directions: "The Executioner will be played by himself." When the curtain rises on curtain calls, Spelvin does not. This mordant conclusion echoes that of Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead: Man is a simple soul inadvertently entangled in a blind mess called life with nary a clue as to its meaning and no aid from a Seeing...
...most controversial is 101 Uses for a Dead Cat (Clarkson N. Potter, $2.95), which has sold 600,000 copies since publication last April and has headed the trade paperback bestseller list for twelve straight weeks. It is a collection of mordant and often macabre cartoons by English Artist Simon Bond, who is violently allergic to living cats but has no end of ingenious notions for recycling cadavers. The Charles Addams of ailurophobia, he sees deceased tabbies as admirable substitutes for more conventional objects ranging from anchors to wine holders (not to mention cat's cradles...
From this nonsense emerges an eerie, seductive thriller that works equally as a mordant police procedural, an occult horror story and an ambivalent look at aborigines fighting for tradition in the technological age. Dialogue is cynical and the cast beguilingly quirky, notably Albert Finney as a detective and Gregory Hines as a manic, mock-suave coroner. Visual effects evoke for the audience the heightened senses of a preternatural predator...