Word: novels
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...audaciously outspoken weekly, until it was banned; he helped found the magazine Europa, but it was suppressed before its first issue reached the newsstands. Party-line critics railed that Hlasko was a "cynic and demoralizer," but a poll of Polish youth named him their favorite writer. Last year his novel, The Eighth Day of the Week, which dealt with the homelessness of a pair of Warsaw lovers, won Poland's highest literary award, though the Polish-West German movie made from the book was banned in his homeland...
...Testament: "But whoso shall offend one of these little ones ... it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea." The offense against Author del Castillo (who calls himself Tanguy in this autobiographical novel) began with the Spanish Civil War. At the age of three he saw corpses in the streets of Madrid, an omen of the dread commonplaces that would haunt his boyhood. Though his mother was a militant left-wing journalist, the Communists shortly clapped her into jail. His father, a social-climbing Frenchman...
...when he finally found his father in Paris, the boy was coldly rebuffed. Tanguy's mother, who also turned up in Paris, had equally little use for him. She was still a left-winger, lost in the intellectual Minotaur's cave of the '30s. At novel's end, with a wistful touch of Chaplinesque pathos, the 25-year-old Del Castillo, currently living in Paris, asks, "What is to become of Tanguy now?" and offers the shadow of a hope that he may "even come to find life the wonder and delight it should...
Doctor Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak. Russia's greatest living poet affirms in Russia's greatest novel since the Revolution that not even Communism can destroy his people's hopes and humanity...
Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov. This superb novel shuttles between the lyrical, the hilarious and the horrifying to tell of a middle-aging emigre's love for a "nymphet," with highly ironic variations on the theme of American innocence and European corruption...