Word: mosaicism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Laid out before Billy, the events of his life and the history of the world become morally contemporary. Vonnegut has a forbearing, thoughtful sense of history, and he is working here-as in all his books taken together-on a vast, loosely linked metaphorical mosaic that portrays the condition of man. For him-as the book's subtitle suggests-the horrors of World War II and the Children's Crusade should be seen as perpetually fresh. Yet, Vonnegut suggests, most men are protectively, intentionally, numb to them. If the numbness is necessary to endure life, it also encourages...
Among the material in his files are research papers showing that there are Fibonacci numerical patterns in the meter of works by Virgil and other Roman poets, and Fibonacci relationships between the different sizes of mosaic patterns in the floors of Greek and Roman ruins. There are studies showing that the ratio between any two successive larger Fibonacci numbers is 1 to 1.618-the same as the ratio between the sides of the "golden rectangle," a form that is traditionally used by artists and architects to produce effects that are most pleasing...
...Mosaic Observations. The reissue two years ago of Death on the Installment Plan helped confirm Céline's status as an important college-cult figure. Castle to Castle may mark wider recognition in the U.S. for Céline as one of the considerable writers of this century. Yet Céline's belief that he was in the esthetic avant-garde is overblown, and so are the claims that this book is a germinal literary event. Celine said that he wrote the way people talk and evidently regarded this as a startling innovation...
Idiosyncratic as Céline's novels are, they nevertheless offer a mosaic of clinically observed poor and pitiable people. Recent French novels, on the other hand, have abjured any attempt to examine man on a Proustian or Balzac -ian scale in favor of esthetic gimcrackery, narrow psychological study and freakish private experiment. As a literary construction, Castle to Castle is equivocal-a hateful papier-mache funfair castle inhabited by real monsters...
...yellow enamel of the decay in his teeth, the wet glistening of his frightened eyes. I could see every hair in his head, as though each was as big as an oak tree. What a confrontation! What am I doing out here, out of my mind, with this strange mosaic-celled animal, prisoner, criminal...