Word: mythicize
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This startling first novel is a sinuous pagan rite. Faith is a sort of classic nymph, but instead of trees, rivers and mountains, she haunts galleries, fine restaurants and her tasteful London house. Jacques is an ageless satyr, but instead of tootling the pipes of Pan in some mythic glade, he rummages in London garbage cans and beds down on park benches. He is human dirt, but of a kind that makes the earth earthy. She is refined past the point of passion, yet curiously unawakened, nervously expectant. In the hands of a less urbane stylist, a sexual encounter between...
...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...