Word: namelessness
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...author admires cinema techniques, and his book would make an excellent art-house movie. But like his earlier work, The Voyeur (TIME, Oct. 13, 1958), it is also thoroughly irritating. A prosaic love triangle is established on a remote banana plantation-a planter (the book's nameless narrator), his wife and a neighboring plantation owner. If this were one of Paul Bowles's African novels of sin and sun, the weather would cloud up on cue, providing a timpani accompaniment to the heroine's rages. Robbe-Grillet cheerfully invents a greater fault. Obsessed by the reality...
...Devilmaker. In general, Bahian art is the product of humble and nameless artisans. But so potent is Exú that even making his image is rarely undertaken except by direct appointment by the Orixás (gods). Top Bahian devilmaker today is Reginaldo Andrade Costa, 28, a part-time garage mechanic who agreed to make them only when a regal candomblé priestess known as a mãe do santo (mother of the saint) explained that the iron figures were harmless until "blessed." His raw material is scrap iron, but Costa's crudely formed statuettes are striking embodiments...
...product of a "death drive"? Is civilization at the mercy of a nameless army of self-annihilators, men who kill with an almost sexual relish because they are secretly in love with death? In The War Lover (an October Book-of-the-Month Club choice), Novelist John Hersey (The Wall, A Single Pebble) has apparently sworn by the beard of Freud to bed Mars on the analyst's couch...
Sebastian Knight, a novelist, has fallen through the last trap door, death. His half brother, the nameless first-person narrator of the novel, feels the loss like a psychic amputation. It is as if a great secret had been buried with Sebastian, perhaps the meaning of life itself. The half brother determines to ferret out the secret by reconstructing Sebastian Knight's life in a biography. His quest takes him to a college chum of Sebastian's at Cambridge who recalls a miserable emigre trying desperately to be more pukka than the sahibs. (Nabokov graduated from Cambridge...
Beautiful or not, his works took on a brooding presence, seemed inhabited by a nameless spirit in a way that a savage artist would recognize. The swelling curves of a woman also suggested the surge of a hillside, the texture of water-shaped stones. The figures swallowed the light here, emitted it there, and a viewer walked away feeling that he had seen stone or wood or bronze touched with life...