Word: novelists
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...grey old man was surely "the sounding bell of this world," wrote Russian Novelist Maxim Gorky. "Surely he is great and holy, [although] sometimes he seems to be conceited and intolerant, like a Volga preacher." Sometimes it was "painfully unpleasant" to hear his comments on women: "a string of indecent words . . . unspeakably vulgar. . . . He is really a whole orchestra, but not all the horns are playing in unison. ... It is terribly stupid to call a man a genius. It is quite impossible to understand what genius is. It is far simpler and clearer to say-Leo Tolstoy...
...print in the U.S., are now republished in a single volume with his Reminiscences of Chekhov and Andreyev and a few minor items translated for the first time. In 1900, when he was a young and promising writer of stories, Gorky went to call on the great novelist, later spent some time near Tolstoy's home in the Crimea. Perhaps he had expected to find a dull old vegetarian disguised in a peasant's smock and spouting platitudes. He found instead a henpecked, shriveled, electrifying man with "shaggy" eyebrows, "wonderful" hands, a passion for card games, a "shocking...
...book jacket emphasizes that Miss Howe was not originally a novelist, but a monologuist, spending her salad days barnstorming around the country before beginning as a writer. With two books under her belt, Miss Howe is presumably deemed a novelist. Actually, she has remained a monologuist. "We Happy Few" is not a novel, really, but a series of vignettes, all of which black out with a punch line. Many of these are very funny, and Miss Howe's satire bites deep, but wisecracks do not a novel make...
...parodies so effectively: the constant use of literary allusion in conversation. The entire book is larded with supposedly apt quotations, most of them uprooted from English literature and sown broadcast through every chapter. When Dorothea's son wishes to enlist in the Navy, Miss Howe's comment as novelist is "No man is an island," a reference which since the publication of "For Whom the Bell Tolls" has been fighting it out with "This above all" as the most overworked phrase in all literature...
...ended an unconscionably long time later, with the Nazis popping buzz-bombs into London, and Adelaide, at the ripe age of 80, still domiciled in Britannia Mews. British Novelist Margery Sharp (The Nutmeg Tree, Cluny Brown, etc.) must have written this one on the back of a series of old paper bags. Disjointed, rambling and generally vacuous, the story limps from coincidence to coincidence, casually adopting or deserting characters along the way, ending in a burst of good, old-fashioned bathos. Novelist Sharp, who usually manages to be witty, or at least catty, can offer here only a few naughty...