Word: novels
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Holland saw a first novel by a Dutch lady of 67. Her writer's stock in trade was elementary-just a bagful of old memories. Yet with them she managed to fashion a book whose style owes nothing to other writers, whose substance is the stuff of a faraway East Indies setting both languorous and violent. In translation, Maria Dermout's The Ten Thousand Things is an uncommon reading experience, an offbeat narrative that has the timeless tone of legend. Sybille Bedford, another late-starting, first-rate first novelist (TIME, Feb. n, 1957), has put it well: "Someone...
...Shape of Life. The viewpoint is convincingly Negro; yet Cille, the heroine, is a light-skinned outcast who can see both races with a pariah's eyes. In the novel's collisions between black and white, mockery cuts both ways...
...novel takes its flavor from the fable; slyly, wryly taking the long way around-and sometimes taking far too long to illuminate his bitter lessons-Author Feibleman has written a first novel about Negroes that is strikingly unlike most other literary heftings of the black man's burden. Perhaps because he is white. New York-born, New Orleans-reared Novelist Feibleman, 27, lacks the pamphleteer's rage of Richard Wright (Black Boy) and the jazzed-up, Joyced-up intellectual's revulsion of Ralph Ellison (The Invisible Man). His book is not a work of protest...
Color is the villain, but here its evil agent is not oppression by the whites (they are only gently oppressive, and sometimes bumblingly kind), but the hard, protective shell of ignorance secreted by the blacks. The novel's story is of a family festering in such a shell, built of fear and blind religiosity. Don't ask questions, Cille's mother repeats, walling in her children. Don't think; thank...
...shell, but she is marked by its color and shape. The story of growing up and twisting free is outstandingly well told by Novelist Feibleman. The book's most noticeable fault is a sluggish pace, but while the narrative occasionally lacks interest, the characters do not; if the novel lacks the spare silhouette of art, it has, abundantly, the lumpish shape of life...