Word: murdoch
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...UNOFFICIAL ROSE (344 pp.)-Iris Murdoch-Viking...
Happily, the prestidigitator who presides over all this is Iris Murdoch, a literary magician who can transform a traditional romantic triangle into at least a hexagon at the split of an infinitive. As it turns out, every soul for miles around is both loved and in love-in every combination of age and sex known. But the often unseemly relationships never seem seamy...
Manipulating masterfully, Miss Murdoch turns out a deft three-in-one book: a sort of combined superior soap opera, teddibly British novel of sensibility, and philosophical inquiry into reality...
...over Tintoretto. In so doing. Authoress Murdoch. 42. who in real life is a philosophy professor at Oxford, has denied herself many of the props she resorted to in her earlier novels. Scrapped is the totally grotesque seduction. (Nobody tries to make love in an upturned church bell.) Gone is the really weird character. (In one book, a lady anthropologist expertly brandishes a samurai sword and refers to herself as a severed head.) Except for a knife driven through a doll's heart, one attempted suicide, a to-do over whether old Hugh Peronett should sell his beloved Tintoretto...
...Author Murdoch's intelligence, both as critic and novelist (The Flight from the Enchanter, The Sandcastle), is above question. But this sophisticated shocker seems to have little point beyond the homely moral that those who think life would be simpler without moral rules are very simple indeed. Also, the great uncouched majority may well find food for the suspicion that-in some hands-psychiatry may involve demonological matters leading not to a liberation of the mind but to some thing closer to a witches' Sabbath...