Word: novels
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Near the Water. A daffy piece of South Pacifiction, based on Wiliam Brinkley's novel about some officers and men engaged in the Navy's public relations and their own private affairs TIME...
...Germans, no matter what the rest of the world says, have a wonderful sense of humor-if only they were not so serious about it. This picture, adapted from the last novel published by the late Thomas Mann, is a classic instance of deutscher Witz: a good joke, badly told but brilliantly explained, heartily laughed at by the teller, laboriously retold from several other angles, and reduced, in conclusion, to its philosophic essence. In this case, unfortunately, the essence is a dull epigram. "Love the world," Mann's hero cries, "and the world will love you." The statement expresses...
...this spare, direct first novel by a 25-year-old Californian, the members of the triangle are less interesting than the author's skill at triangulation. The draftee hero is clean-cut enough to be a sidekick of Frank Merriwell. The girl is sweet enough to grace a soap ad. And the bedeviled antagonist is the victim of an unconscious drive that makes him pathetic rather than villainous. Yet this is the kind of book that demands to be read at one sitting: the people may not be important, but their story...
...reader can have himself a different kind of ball with this book-if he will only persevere. Versatile Author Taylor (Center Ring, W. C. Fields) follows in the footsteps of a master of the picaresque. Tobias Smollett's The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771) was a superbly comical novel, in letter form, about a family traveling around England in the days of highwaymen and top-heavy coaches. Author Taylor's book is not only a parody of Smollett's parody of 18th century travelogues, but of every Western ever written...
Nobel Prizewinner Albert Camus is a writer without small talk. His themes-life, love, death, man, God, time-are large and universal. He returns to them in this collection of six short stories, but the net effect-after his brilliant novel The Fall-is oddly anticlimactic. The trouble seems to lie in the triumph of symbol over substance. He offers a series of intellectual puzzlers in which the clues are elusive, though the humanistic passion that runs through them is strong and clear, reflecting Camus' vision of art as a moral inquiry into man's fate...