Word: narcissus
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...splendid glooms and lucidities in storytelling, could scarcely be better shown than in this collection of eleven long and short tales. They include, besides the familiar sea stories, tales of Poland, England and Asia. Among them are the classic Youth, Amy Foster, Typhoon, The Nigger of the Narcissus, Heart of Darkness. The editor, one of the best of U.S. literary critics, has shown good judgment in not chopping Conrad's longer masterpieces into incomprehensible fragments just to get them inside an anthology. He has also made room for a score of Conrad's wry and courtly letters...
...Black Narcissus (Rank, Universal-International) is the curious story of some Anglican nuns who, in the interests of healing and teaching the Himalayan natives, are sent to establish a new convent in an abandoned mountain harem...
Messrs. Powell & Pressburger have made the most of some melodramatic scenes and have hooked together many close-ups of uncommon sensitiveness and force. But in spite of a considerable lavishing of talent and good intention, Black Narcissus remains a striking sample of bad art, combining the least attractive features of slick and long-haired fiction...
This novel, like Joseph Conrad's The Nigger of the Narcissus, shows how heady a wine the English language may be for a foreign writer of parts who has thoroughly acquired it. Bend Sinister, Vladimir Nabokov's second novel in English (he has written seven in Russian), is one of the most intelligent nightmares of dictatorship in modern fiction. It is also a lip-smacking over the flavors of English prose to rouse the tired syntax in 10,000 editorials. Nabokov's style glimmers with reflections of many great styles (Gogol's, Flaubert's, Joyce...
...that year the brine-soaked polders (fields reclaimed from the sea) have been drained, and some are again growing grass for Holland's dairy herds and grain for Holland's bread. The sandy flats along the North Sea are ablaze again with tulips and hyacinth and narcissus. Broken windows are neatly patched, the cities' rubble cleaned up. Everywhere men are painting doors and balconies and polishing the brass door knobs. On shattered, flooded Walcheren Island, thrifty Hollanders are rooting up German antiglider traps to use for kindling, and to brace the rebuilt dikes. Holland again looks almost...