Word: novels
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Quiet American (Figaro; United Artists). "Innocence," wrote Graham Greene in the novel from which this film is somewhat speciously taken, "is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm." The leper of modern history, as Greene sees him, is the American-he of the "young and unused face" who has made "a profession of friendship, as though it were law or medicine," and who goes about the world infecting whole continents with the botch of good will. On one level the book is a passionate editorial against U.S. innocence abroad. On another...
...much inhumanity can a man bear to inflict on his fellow men before his conscience calls a halt? The answer to this question is the substance of a harrowing little novel from Holland that combines the impact of a documentary film with the prodding of a remorseless sermon. The scene is Westerbork, a concentration camp in occupied Holland, from which Jews were sent on to Auschwitz, Sobibor and other extermination centers in Eastern Europe. The book's real heroes and villains are Jews, while the Nazis are seen only as almost impersonal agents of evil...
...weighted by the sweet stench of stale funeral flowers banked around a seven-day-old corpse. The past, for the mourning family of Stanislaw Machek, is a terrain of lust and violence, seen dimly through the murk of love, greed, self-righteousness and madness. In a brilliantly constructed first novel, Author Richard Bankowsky, 29, leads the mourners at Machek's wake, one by one, back across that dark landscape...
...each character's rambling recall, his own weaknesses are laid bare and another's motivation is made clearer. But it is the figure of Stanislaw that holds the book together, and in him Bankowsky has created a near-tragic embodiment of guilt. The flaws in this novel-occasional sentimentalism, and a needlessly interjected chapter set a generation in the future-do not detract from its great, raw impact...
...setting of this latest, bestseller-bound historical novel by Elizabeth Goudge (rhymes with Scrooge) is 17th century England. King Charles I has put John Hampden in prison for refusing a Forced Loan, thus setting many a British taxpayer ablaze with indignation. Now, battle is joined-King v. Parliament. And though Froniga is a gypsy on her mother's side, she is also a Parliamentarian on various other sides, while Yoben is a Royalist. Enter, inevitably, Oliver Cromwell, whom Novelist Goudge feels she knows intimately, including his conversation. "My lord, we must act at once!" cries "Old Noll" Cromwell...