Word: novels
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Perhaps the freshest play is Ptakovina, by Milan Kundera, who is one of those fighting to keep the writers' union committed to the liberalization program of 1968. Kundera's novel of Czech Stalinism, The Joke, has the directness of a fist in the face; it has been made into a film shown at Cannes this year. Ptakovina is a made-up word, literally "Birdtrick," meaning stupidity...
Sound of Whimpering. The new novel finds her arrived from Zambesia, lugging her suitcase around London in a superexistential funk. When her second marriage collapsed in the previous volume, she had promised herself, "When I get to England, I'll find a man I can really be married...
...futuristic coda comes as a letdown. It is too sketchy either as science fiction or as an ending to a novel whose main strength is its meticulous reading of psychic signals. The author's thesis is hardly novel, but it cannot be ignored: in a sick society, the roles of madness and sanity are reversed. This society is sick unto disaster, so alternatives must be sought in areas removed from what passes as reason. Lessing may be a flawed prophet, but as witness she is persuasive and disturbing...
Lessing does not merely believe in ESP; she experiences it. In the novel, Martha realizes after a friend's suicide that she had seen it in her mind before it happened. Doris Lessing admits to seeing such pictures "all the time. I am capable of remarkable mental pictures." She believes that ESP is a normal perceptive sense that has atrophied, and that hallucination is often another misnomer-a way that scientists have of labeling things to seal off inquiry. In her new pursuit, she is clear-eyed, dedicated and calm. Her next book is to be called Briefing...
...example; there is the question of the Reality of the Situation. Michel Piccoli plays an author who is writing a science fiction novel about an electronic device that controls people for a minute at a time. Is Piccoli living the story he is writing? Or is he dreaming that he is living the story? Or is what we view merely a psychotic fantasy resulting from an auto crash? There there is the problem of the actors themselves. Why does Michel Piccoli play a character named Edgar Piccoli? And is it significant that Catherine Deneuve plays someone simply referred...