Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Well before its publication, this second novel by a hitherto obscure Australian had become an economic event. Harper & Row ran off 225,000 hardback copies and put up $100,000 as an initial advertising budget. The Literary Guild made the book its main selection for June, relegating Erich Segal's Oliver's Story, a dead-certain moneymaker, to second place. Avon Books shelled out $1.9 million for paperback reprint rights, topping the record $1.85 million that Bantam Books paid for E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime two years...
...fate of The Thorn Birds will certainly not hang on literary merit. With the broadest strokes and the most perfervid prose, the novel traces three generations of the Cleary family-from poverty in New Zealand to wealth in Australia to triumphs on the London stage and in the Vatican. None of the Clearys, however, is as interesting as Australia itself. McCullough knows how to stage convincing droughts, floods and fires. Even her descriptions of landscapes sometimes flare into life...
Will to Live. Against all such trends, Italian Author Elsa Morante, 65, has turned out a supremely unfashionable book. History: A Novel is a long, slow read. It is almost entirely lacking in sex or suspense; when characters are doomed, Morante sounds a warning well in advance of the event. The novel's main figures-Ida Mancuso, a widowed Roman schoolteacher, and her two sons -are neither witty nor especially bright. Ostensibly the book shows what happens to these three between the years 1940 and 1947, during the ravages of World War II and the uncertainties of its aftermath...
...dogs and cats to speak intelligently to the mystical child Giuseppe. Such sentimentality intrudes on the book's naturalistic tenor but seems, in the end. integral to Morante's purpose: to look at horror with innocent eyes and ask "Why?" In articulating that question, this demanding, powerful novel meets the stipulation laid down by Albert Camus: "The writer's role is not free of difficult duties. By definition he cannot put himself today in the service of those who make history; he is at the service of those who suffer it." Paul Gray
...fact, Irving advances a novel thesis that has already infuriated some historians. His question: What did Hitler know about the extermination of Europe's Jews, and when did he know it? Nearly everyone has assumed that the Führer himself ordered the final solution. Irving argues to the contrary that: 1) Hitler did not know about the programmed executions of the Jews until some time in 1943 or 1944, and 2) "the incontrovertible evidence is that Hitler ordered on Nov. 30, 1941, that there was to be 'no liquidation' of the Jews...