Word: novels
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...weak. This is not to say that the writing in the play lacks interest; far from it. The text is a rich mine of various kinds of lower-class Elizabethan speech, including laughable treatments of French and Welsh dialects. It is filled with captivating puns, doubles ententes, and novel images; and it constitutes a veritable dictionary of original invectives, insults, and expletives...
...Bridge on the Drina, by Ivo Andric. An elegiac novel by a fine Yugoslav writer distills 300 years of his land's history in an account of the idlers and warriors who passed over a beautiful stone bridge...
Time was when a fictional hero sold his soul to the Devil; nowadays the Devil often seems to sell his to the hero. Manhattan-born Sigrid de Lima, 37, has attempted a novel in the older fashion, but before Praise a Fine Day ends, her nameless painter-hero appears more devilish than the odd bargain he makes and breaks...
...cultural handicappers who tick off lists of the Ten Best Books To Be Stranded in Toledo With have missed a bet. Far more interesting might be a compilation of the Ten Best Bad Novels-books whose artistic flaws are mountainous but whose merits, like Loreleis on the rocks above, keep on luring readers. A place on such a list would go to Author Condon's second novel, an almost complete catalogue of humanity's disorders, including incest, dope addiction, war, politics, brainwashing and multiple murder. The book carries a superstructure of plot that would capsize Hawaii, and badly...
...Sooner or "later, like the blind beggars toppling after their blind leader in Bruegel's chillingly ironic painting, all the author's characters stumble into the ditch of mortality. Satirist Condon is not afraid to set up outrageously improbable situations to achieve his effects. In his first novel, The Oldest Confession (1958), an Achilles among criminals was brought to heel while trying to hijack Goya's The Second of May, from the Prado. In the current fable, a brilliant Chinese disciple of Pavlov-a sort of Marxist Dr. Fu Manchu-directs the capture, brainwashing and reflex-conditioning...