Word: mythicize
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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...
...alternately fascinated and repelled by the work of the "trackers," human beasts of burden whose yoke is a bamboo rope, who haul the junk from precarious footholds, step by straining step. Chief of the trackers is a Chinese John Henry nicknamed Old Pebble. Old Pebble is a kind of mythic Nature Boy who can chant his weary men through a rough gorge or leap into the treacherous waters to unsnag the towline and break surface with it like a trout...
Allowing for much practical ellipsis and a few brazen disfigurations (it was Hector, not Paris, who killed Patroclus), the script by John Twist shows a commendable respect for the letter of the myth. It is the spirit that is Twisted. Homer's was a mythic drama in which gods and heroes, love and politics, war and religion moiled in the mortar of imagination. Helen of Troy is basically a story of hot pants in high places. The hero, accordingly, is not "godlike Hector" or "great Achilles" but "soft Paris," whom even Helen called a coward. As the part...
Finnegans Wake, a poem of sleep and flux, is also a masterpiece of systematic ambiguity, honoring less the waking mind that made it than the night world of humanity and the mythic "nightmare of history" from which Joyce as a young man said he wished to awake. Critics may wonder if Finnegans Wake is not a huge, jesting and virtuoso footnote to Joyce's simplest and finest poem, Ecce Puer, written soon after his father died and his grandson Stephen was born...
...almost bound to happen. Graves has been interested for years in the Imperial Roman period and the Near East into which Jesus Christ was born. Graves has written ingeniously learned novels about Rome (I, Claudius), Byzantium (Count Belisarius), the mythic age of Greece (Hercules, My Shipmate). His friend, the late great T. E. Lawrence, who spent the best years of his life between the Nile and the Promised Land, once amused himself by mapping the probable route of the Israelites in the Sinai desert. Graves's latest job is in the same line but not so modest...