Word: novellas
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...strange and more then a little wonderful when a writer who has shown talent and yet been a disappointment in the past--and whom seemingly every-one else has lauded to the ends of the earth-creates something genuinely entertaining and even a bit enlightening. John Cheever's new novella. Oh What A Paradise It Seems, is a small package of this kind of eye-opening, pleasant strangeness. Perhaps because it rings more honest than many of his earlier efforts, the work pulses in a way much of Cheever's other work does not. Most important, Paradise given the palpable...
...close affinity between the beauties of clean fresh water and the splendors of love. And so, not surprisingly, the sporadic affair Scars has with the curvaceous blond he accosts in a bank queue provides the occasion for plenty of libidinous raptures and a good deal of bewilderment. The novella shuttles, thee, back and forth between a blasted landscape that aches for renewal-the highways stretch out against the country like corroded veins and the lakes are acid pools-and an aging man who fears similar, personal deterioration...
Paradise may not be a masterpiece. Cheever's characters, after all, are thin, doll-like creations next to those of his colleagues Updike and Bellow. And even though the novella has a broader vision than one might otherwise expect from Cheever, it still lacks the acute moral curiosity one expects from a greater writer. He still yields to the impulse to pattern events, to make a sort of literary bon-bon although this one is finely textured and eminently palatable...
...author's view of community and civic ethics has roots in Talmudic law; her images of evil spring from Jewish folklore and mysticism. These influences get their longest airing in a novella with the intimidating title Puttermesser and Xanthippe. The former is a lawyer in New York's department of receipts and disbursements; the latter a female golem, an artificial being that Puttermesser fashioned from potting soil. With Xanthippe's aid, the civil ser vant becomes mayor and turns the city into a Utopia. Unfortunately, it is the nature of golems to turn against their creators. Xanthippe...
This first section of The Age of Wonders is a stunning novella, an elegiac distillation of incomprehension and loss. But Appelfeld then brings Bruno back, some 25 years later, to the same Austrian town. There has been a revival of interest in his father's writings, and the son is invited from Israel to assist in the arrangements for the new edition. This shorter episode raises questions that are not answered, including the fate of Bruno's parents and the means by which he escaped his own destiny on the cattle train. Also, the understandable passivity that Bruno...