Word: novels
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Christian Coffee House. Blond, blue-eyed Pierre Delattre, 28, was graduated from the University of Pennsylvania (English major) and from the University of Chicago Divinity School. Four years ago he moved to Sausalito, just across the Golden Gate from San Francisco, where he wrote a novel (one of three, all unpublished), worked as a switchman on the Southern Pacific Railroad, and preached at a weekend church in Stinson Beach. After he was ordained a minister in the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. (Northern), Delattre moved to Berkeley, where he helped develop a program on religion and contemporary culture...
...anesthesia than jazz bores, but this school is wrong. A bullfight bore may re-enact Manolete's death spasms, but a jazz bore will replay the same Charlie Parker record, with contrapuntal commentary, until his woofer melts. The public ear has been grievously bent, and therefore any novel about jazzmen that is fresh, authentic and ungummed by cultism is an achievement...
Playwright Garson (Born Yesterday) Kanin (rhymes with rain in), a jazz saxophonist during his knockabout days, has managed this much. His novel is cast in the form of a onetime saxman's fond, moody reminiscence of the hard-blowing early '303. Jogged by a telephone call from one of his old partners, the narrator recalls the rise and fall of the combo they formed. The group begins as a trio, built around an astonishingly good young trumpeter. Then the saxman finds a pianist at a Harlem rent party, and the trio sounds even better as a quartet. Bookings...
Jazz Sermon. Somehow, the shock is not shocking. The evil act. which should dominate the book, is not made really believable. The last chapters of the novel have the faintly embarrassing tone of a sermon in jazz language attempted by an overearnest cleric. The tormented murderer asks: "Why is it that if we could all learn to play together the way we did-why is it we couldn't learn to live together?" The narrator's sanctimonious reply: "Woody, if we could-even between us-answer that simple question-seemingly simple-we could turn this into...
...Sound and the Fury. A laundered but effective version of Faulkner's novel about a hard man (Yul Brynner) and a wild, bewildered girl (Joanne Woodward) who fight each other as well as the genteel Southern decay around them...