Word: mosley
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...that had lived as friendly neighbors for decades in British India became mindless enemies in Hindu India and Moslem Pakistan. Within nine months after partition, some 16 million refugees had fled crazed mobs in both countries. Perhaps 600,000 were slaughtered. "If they were children," wrote British Historian Leonard Mosley, describing the carnage, "they were picked up by their feet and their heads smashed against the wall. If they were girls they were raped and their breasts were chopped off. And if they were pregnant, they were disemboweled...
NATALIE/NATALIA by Nicholas Mosley. 316 pages. Coward, McCann & Geoghegan...
...first meets M.P. Tony Greville late at night. He is skipping along the sidewalk, keeping to the pavement lines like a child. It is not quite the beginning one would expect from Mosley, the author of Impossible Object, a difficult novel which has become a kind of sacred object among aspiring writers. But matters are soon set straight. Says Tony. "The skipping was in my mind, the lines and squares in the universe...
...reader has to be in literary training to follow Mosley's hopscotch course. He is one of a number of writers, the best of them Nabokov, whose subject is often the nature of creativity itself. What fictional furniture there is seems of secondary importance, to be moved around at will. Tony seems negligent and disillusioned. He is married to Elizabeth, whom he "likes," but his only real involvement is an obsessive affair with Natalia Jones, the wife of another M.P. On the face of it Natalia seems a routine bitch. Her jealousy, her suicide threats, her retreat...
Eventually one wonders if there is not a little Flying Wallenda in Author Mosley-a lot of skill and daring and not a little wobble. The unsatisfied muse, Natalie, might point out that there are too many attenuated aperçus here and too big an aesthetic load weighing on such a slight situation. But the sweet muse, Natalia, would smile upon a good writer trying to define and dramatize the mystery of creativity. In the end, Tony thinks, "If Natalia was sun and earth, I was gravity." It is a stunning metaphor for a writer's goal...