Word: novels
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...attachment to the spigot, Brendan turns it off during his writing bouts. Not that it is easy to stick to work, now that the vagabond liver has money and fame. Brendan has started a novel about Dublin, but, he says, "I can't get on with it with all this blanking success." Meanwhile, since his Borstal Boy was banned as "obscene" by the Irish government, he strides about bellowing (to the tune of MacNamara's Band...
When Author Nikos Kazantzakis died last year at 74, he was known to U.S. readers mostly for his novel Zorba the Greek, a flashing testament to the proposition that every minute of life should be lived to the sensuous, sensual hilt. At least twice, reportedly, he failed to win the Nobel Prize by the narrowest of margins. By taking for his own the name of Homer's poem, by adopting Odysseus as his own hero, Kazantzakis has underlined the audacity of his undertaking. His 33,333 lines measure its vastness. But the poem's real boldness lies...
...most part, Barzun insists, the mystery story is in trouble. His explanation: the detective story is a "parasite" of the novel, and when the serious novel itself "concentrates on the whacky," as it does today, and "starts from the conviction that society and all who dwell in it are disagreeable and worthless," the detective story is simply thrown off its feed. Good detective fiction needs "a world that we accept because it is conventional . . . Why pursue the criminal if the victim and society are not worth protecting...
This sprawling novel sets out to give full-dress treatment to the founding of the state of Israel. Reaching from the first Zionist stirrings in 1881 to the Arab war of 1947, Author Uris packs his pages with arresting scenes. Leaky, spavined steamers, jammed to the scuppers with Jews, make the dangerous run to the Palestine beaches; murder gangs of Jews and Arabs hunt each other out in the sun-bleached hills; intrigue and chicanery fill the halls of the United Nations and the chancelleries of Europe; the innocent and the defenseless suffer and die more often than the clashing...
Author Leon (Battle Cry) Uris, 34, spent two years and traveled 50,000 miles getting the facts for his story, and he relates it in a serviceable, exclamatory prose. But he has written a novel as well as history, and no amount of research can help him in his fiction. His hero, Ari Ben Canaan, has all the two-dimensional subtlety of a sheriff in a TV western; his heroine, Gentile Kitty Fremont, is so often petty-minded and petulant that some readers may suspect Author Uris of a bias against shiksas. Despite its partisan trimmings, Exodus in large measure...