Word: nihilist
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...Hipster-Nihilist. The device that Fuentes uses to launch the novel is as old as Chaucer: a group on a pilgrimage-in this case, figurative rather than literal. It is Holy Week, and packed into a Volkswagen en route from Mexico City to Veracruz are Franz, a Sudeten German who once worked as an architect in a Nazi concentration camp; Isabel, his thrill-a-minute cutie; Javier, a middle-aged dud poet; and Elizabeth, his love-starved (as distinguished from sex-starved) wife. Though each is in search of an intensely personal salvation, each represents a familiar 20th century type...
...Negro servant Bamboola, a naive firebrand who believes that overnight "the Negroes will be made white." There is Blank, a poet who dabbles in politics and diddles in literature. There is Innocenti, a lawyer passing as a waiter and living out the logical absurdity of a politically engaged nihilist. Pantagleize is oblivious to all except Rachel Silberchatz, a Jewish girl as splinteringly comic in her undeviating revolutionary fanaticism as Pantagleize is in his clownish wooing...
...somehow overcome the curious condescension which takes the form of sticking up for and explaining away anything, howsoever outrageous, which Negroes, individually or collectively, might do." Distinction must be made between "the vast Negro underclass, a disorganized, angry, hurt group easily given to self-destructive violence, and the radical, nihilist youth [that seeks to use the underclass for] apocalyptic confrontation with white society." The differentiation "means facing up to some of the realities of life in that class that liberals have been notoriously unwilling to acknowledge...
...Earth sustains those characters with exceptional force and conviction, as if he were trying to enlarge the ludicrous to epic proportions. "Where the hell else but in America," asks one of his characters, "could you have a cheerful nihilism?" Earth is a bit of a nihilist about the novel itself; he is convinced that it is a dying literary form...
...from painting to sculpture after seeing Moore. Tucker strips the image to its irreducible core, colors his work to give clues to its form, but abstracts it to the point where it would connote almost anything or nothing. He agrees with King that "five years ago, sculpture was still nihilist and negative. Today it's about life, not death, and we're not afraid of words like beauty, joy and pleasure...