Word: novels
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Light in the Forest was taken from a 1953 novel, but you failed to say that whoever took it should have given it back...
Summoned into emergency session three weeks ago amidst Russian cries of threatening war, the U.N. General Assembly met in Manhattan to defuse the international time bombs threatening the peace of the Middle East. Last week, after eight days of palaver, the Assembly brought forth its own novel method of bomb disposal. The technique: wrap the infernal device in verbal cotton wool-this deadens that unpleasant ticking sound-and tiptoe quickly away...
Again the novel's narrator is Darley, a seedy, itinerant Irish schoolteacher. Again the plot concerns his sexual and soulful involvements with Justine, a feline Egyptian Jewess; Nessim, her millionaire husband; Melissa, a tubercular Greek dancer. There is also an assortment of other exotics, who seem to have crawled from beneath a blistered and immemorial stone of Alexandria-Scobie, the transvestite policeman; Toto de Brunei, who dies with a hatpin rammed through his brain; Capodistria, the goatish sybarite; hare-lipped Narouz, who carries a severed head in his saddlebag; Pursewarden, who has discovered "the uselessness of having opinions...
...Proust used the theories of Philosopher (and Nobel Prizewinner) Henri Bergson in his titanic effort to write the definitive novel of time and memory, so Durrell seeks to base his four-decker work on Einstein's space-time continuum. Justine, Balthazar, and the projected third book, Mountolive, will "interlap, interweave, in a purely spatial relation. Time is stayed. The fourth part alone will represent time and be a true sequel...
...readers can be indifferent to his work or unaware that they are encountering a formidable talent. But, as was the case with Proust and Joyce, his greatest impact may be on other writers-who have become increasingly dismayed at the possibility of finding anything to say in the "realistic" novel that has not already been said better by Tolstoy. Dostoevsky, Melville, Thackeray, Balzac...