Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...forays against Zhivago's politics complained that the character lacked a social conscience, that the book itself was devoid of a social meaning. And, in a way, it is legitimate criticism. When a protagonist of great stature fails to come to terms with reality, it is seldom a social novel; but it is often great tragedy, and such is Pasternak's book...
Zhivago's tragedy is somewhat confused by Pasternak's limitations as a novelist. This is his first novel. He is a poet, and during the Stalin era of literary frigidity, he devoted himself to Russian translations of Shakespeare. As a poet, he has been schooled to write from a single point of view, a single consciousness ranging on a variety of subjects or focusing on one. Most poetry is characterized by this synthesis of artist and the created personality. For poetry, it is basic; for the novel, it can be disastrous. The fusion of Zhiva-go and Pasternak admits...
Like a stink bomb with a time fuse, a typescript of Nicholas Crabbe has lain for almost half a century in Oxford's Bodleian Library. Now exhumed for first publication, the novel fulfills the pungent promise hinted by literary investigators who have concerned themselves with the strange case of its author, Frederick William Serafino Austin Lewis Mary Rolfe, alias "Baron Corvo...
...convert at 26, studied for the priesthood but was expelled from his seminary in Rome. For the rest, he was a weirdly gifted writer, schoolmaster, painter, photographer, workhouse inmate, homosexual, paranoiac, and perhaps the most merciless autobiographer ever to snarl at his own image. In his famed, partly autobiographical novel, Hadrian the Seventh, Rolfe created a fantasy in which the College of Cardinals chooses as Pope an expelled English novice (like himself) who reforms the church and the world, and dies a martyr. In The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole, Rolfe told the truth, little less fantastic, about...
...While Crabbe is doomed to have a bad time with publishers, Author Rolfe clearly had a wonderful time writing about them, and British Bibliographer Cecil Woolf, in his introduction, provides a convenient Who's Who. Grant Richards, publisher of such authors as Shaw and Housman, appears in the novel as Doron Oldcastle, "an ostentatious tyrannical turpilucricupidous half-licked pragmatic provincial bumpkin." Publisher John Lane, who published works by Anatole France, Ernest Dowson and Francis Thompson, is seen as Slim Schelm, "a tubby little pot-bellied bantam, looking as though he had been suckled on bad beer." Oldcastle commissions Crabbe...