Word: novels
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...nothing prepared me for covering Vietnamese politics, which are unfathomable to the Vietnamese themselves." Viet Nam and its troubles, he says, are an obsessive subject with everyone in the bureau. For occasional lighthearted relief, Clark reports that he and his colleagues have spent their spare time working out some novel methods for ending the war. It is doubtful that either statesmen or generals will agree on the peace-winning potential of the most imaginative of the bureau's ideas: "Drop 50,000 Honda motor scooters by parachute on Hanoi. In the hands of Vietnamese riders, they are peculiarly lethal...
...France," a well-traveled patient told a doctor in Newcastle upon Tyne, "when a horse develops clots in its legs, it is treated with a diet of garlic and onions." The doctor was a Burma-born heart-disease researcher, I. Sudhakaran Menon, and the remark suggested to him a novel line of attack on the problem of clot formation in human blood vessels...
...external excellence, The Castle is as shallow and enervated as its predecessor, The Trial. Possibly the fault lies with the master himself; his aphoristic sweep seems cinematically untranslatable. As a novel, The Castle has inspired sheaves of interpretations. In one theory, the Castle is seen as religion inhabited by the unseeable God. The land surveyor, then, is on a pilgrim's progression to salvation. More fashionable exegeses view the Castle as untenanted. Heaven is barren and the village is the earth below. In the most perverse-and most Kafkaesque-analysis, the fable is turned. The villagers have only...
...imagines Vidal pressing these occasional pieces into hard covers, pronouncing them a book, then hurrying back to the new novel. The irony is that, like Norman Mailer and James Baldwin among others, Vidal is more "creative" at nonfiction than fiction. The tart, slight, often exquisite perceptions in this book-concentrated as sour fruit drops-are really his forte...
Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time, a serial novel issued in fairly regular installments for more than 18 years, can now be seen for what it is: a great prose composition in which the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Powell invites his dedicated (though still small) readership to think of his work in musical terms. The descriptive form that suggests itself for his nine novels is a series of piano concertos with variations on a single complex theme. Powell's narrator, Nick Jenkins, is, of course, at the piano...