Word: odyssey
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Cabell? That quiet Virginian who wrote nineteen books; "the author of Jurgen," as he was loathe to be remembered. James Branch Cabell, a William and Mary graduate, newspaper reporter, magazine writer, coal miner, genealogist, and historian. Any of the latter-day literati who have skipped through the wispy medieval odyssey of a pawnbroker called Jurgen, and chuckled over all the phallic imagery, can appreciate Cabell as representative of an era--the era of gin-flasks, flappers, and sex in the back seat of Mr. Ford's Monstrosity...
Hidden Step. For all her declination toward the horizontal, Sally Jay is not all bed. In her ruefully recounted odyssey among the oddballs, she is often comically appealing. Desperately worried lest she be mistaken for the sort of girl tourist who debarks with a guidebook and a six-month supply of toilet paper, Sally Jay manages a world-weary yawn even when she feels like yipping for joy. She thanks an Italian seducer who wants to marry her to get a nonexistent dowry. Why? "For restoring my cynicism. I was too young to lose it." Only when she falls...
...best excuse for retelling a myth is to be unfaithful to it. When Joyce reworked the Odyssey, turning Ulysses into the Jew Leopold Bloom and the wine-dark sea into Dublin, the structure came from the past but the sense of it was all in the present-which is the essence of parable. To re-create the past as past is merely archaeology or entertainment, or both. Author Mary (The Last of the Wine) Renault's The King Must Die (a midsummer Book-of-the-Month Club choice) is both, but she is a better literary archaeologist than...
...trap: Xenophon, a 30-year-old Athenian, who was a friend of Socrates and the world's first war correspondent; he accompanied the expedition as a curious observer, not a soldier. This modern translation by the late Professor William H. D. Rouse (the Iliad and the Odyssey) marks another important addition to the ancient classics that are being turned into briskly readable, contemporary English by such able writers as Robert Graves (The Golden Ass of Apuleius. Lucan's Pharsalia), Rolfe Humphries (Ovid's Metamorphoses), Moses Hadas (An Ethiopian Romance by Heliodorus), Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald (Sophocles...
They had reached the coast of the Black Sea. The long battle odyssey of some 1,500 miles was over, for here were Greek cities, and here should have been an end of fighting. But the end of fighting brought the beginning of distrust. The soldiers turned against each other. Xenophon had to use all his oratorical skill to keep them from stoning him to death because the troops suspected he planned to use them to found a city instead of taking them home. The glorious march up country ends on this pitiful note of bickering and betrayal. Scarcely half...