Word: novels
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...there is any rhetoric or fancy writing that puts you off at the beginning or the end," says Ernest Hemingway in his introductory puff to this novel of Italy in the '30s, "just ram through it." Hemingway is wrong in his warning about where the "rhetoric" is to be found-it comes in the middle, and in cascades-but his advice is still worth taking...
...this point, In Sicily is an excellent novel about the same kind of simple and appealing people that Ignazio Silone (Bread and Wine, The Seed Beneath the Snow) writes about-all done in a clipped Hemingwayesque style. But just about midway, Novelist Vittorini goes off on a wild-swinging tear into symbolism which is part sentimentality, part hallucination. His characters begin to chant lugubrious dirges about the "world's outrages" that sound as if they had been written by William Saroyan with an ice pack on his head...
Adriana is the ripe, first-person singular heroine of The Woman of Rome, a long, languorous novel by Italy's most trumpeted living writer, Alberto Moravia. U.S. readers may well ask what all the critical tizzy is about. In The Woman of Rome, Moravia has blended poverty and lust with considerable technical skill, but, given Adriana's temperament, his bid for deeper meanings, e.g., human helplessness caught in life's iron grip, was doomed from the start...
...verdict gushes too high. Firbank's light and dexterous hand may have "altered the pace of dialogue for the [contemporary] novel" and his work may represent a "startling technical achievement." But the proper place for his silver cobwebs is in, round, and underneath a closed circle of impalpable esthetes...
...publishers call The Eye of God (the name of the local mountain) a novel. It isn't. Anecdotes don't make a novel any more than edelweiss make an alp; but when Bemelmans does the picking, they make a bright nosegay...