Word: mythical
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...moment of truth for these characters sadly shatters the mythic mood of the play. When the bandit is revealed as a braggart, the samurai as a snuffling coward and his wife as a trollop, the Kanins' script, unlike the film, fumbles away the Swiftian savagery of Akutagawa for something close to farce. What Akutagawa intended as the subtle shadow play of appearance and reality becomes, in the wigmaker's summing up, little more than an optical illusion: "Truth is a firefly...
...time to the lazy summer afternoons of his youth. A 12th century armored knight tilts tragically with a 20th century locomotive that he takes for a dragon. The Shore Line at Sunset is a simple parable on the vagrant power of beauty, but its mermaid heroine is evoked in mythic watercolors: "Her upper body was all moon pearl . . . and her lower body all slithering ancient green-black coins...
Author Bazin, 47, writes sparely or sensuously as the mood of his novel demands. His insights into feminine psychology are acute, and a book that might have succumbed to formula patness moves with a mythic interior logic. Rarely, indeed, has a mere man so well defined the dynamics of the female life drive, in which man is at once a biological necessity and an emotional luxury...
...Madness of Excess. Operating from the underlying premise that God does not exist, Camus argued in The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) that the certainty of death made life itself a ridiculous charade, and therefore "absurd." He likened man's lot to the somber task of the Greek mythic hero Sisyphus, who was condemned by the gods to roll a huge boulder to the top of a hill, only to see it roll down again, to the end of time. But from this recognition Camus drew his own peculiar sustenance: "Crushing truths perish by being acknowledged," i.e., knowledge...
When the idyl is broken by the arrival of the NKVD major, Hryhory shoots the man dead and escapes to Manchuria and freedom with Natalka. The mythic and dreamlike quality of the book suggests that Author Bahriany may be more interested in symbolism than adventure. But his fine telling of man's struggle against nature seems more compelling than his deeply felt account of a freedom fighter's war with totalitarianism...