Word: mythical
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...fantasies, doesn't leave much room for secondary characters. Except for Allert, no one in this book "comes alive," as the handbooks say. The effete, intellectual psychiatrist, the intense, childlike mistress, and the sensuous, motherly wife all remain semi-real cartoons, and yet all expand to become figures of mythic proportion in Allert's private universe...
TAKING ONESELF TOO seriously is always a gamble. Failures that lesser writers could get away with leave gaping holes in Hawkes's work. Allert's wife, Ursula, for example, never quite achieves mythic stature and threatens to remain little more than a parody, lounging about in a state of perpetual langour that is supposed to suggest sensuality. Hawkes only makes things worse with his clumsy explanation...
This kind of time is mythic, biblical, fairy tale time. In a mysterious way it preserves instead of oppressing; the men of Leaf Storm and No One Writes to the Colonel--not a Buendia among them--are all slaves of a destructive sort of time. The remnants of Aureliano's revolutionary army are tricked into waiting paralyzed for a promised pension that never arrives. The whole town waits for death--the individual or collective crisis that might give them a sense of direction, something to fight against--and when death comes it comes as an anticlimax. The "leaf storm...
...fiction all over again. These are the same men who shot three thousand people in Macondo's central square and carted them off in a freight train, and the next morning denied that the massacre had ever occurred. The politics of One Hundred Years of Solitude seem mythic, distanced from contemporary issues and personalities; but the massacre of that hot Sunday afternoon is something destined to be repeated over and over again, in the streets of the cities of South America and in the pages of its novelists...
...recent evening in the splendidly gilded 19th century Mabel Tainter Opera House in Menomenie, Wis., the sound system was awry and the stage a bit small, but the cast of eight gave a spirited performance all the same-of the mythic Andersson family emigrating from Sweden, its terrors of the new country, its settling, its dances, a child's death, the plague of locusts that wiped out the farm and drove the family into rural show business. Terry Hinz is perfect as the boyish paterfamilias, but one remembers especially the dazed, inward quality of Mary Wright as Mrs. Andersson...