Word: odyssey
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Wash-and-Wear Ulysses. The Ulysses of this uneven Odyssey is Professor Arnold Soby, a burnt-out romantic case (his young wife had died years before) with little left but his literary allusions. Encrusted with irony, hobbled by a pedagogue's inability to face life except in terms of art, Soby nevertheless fancies himself a secret worshiper of the wisdom of the body-for him symbolized by the bacchic visions that lured Gustav Aschenbach, the aging hero of Thomas Mann's famous novella, Death in Venice, to a debasing but idyllic passion for a beautiful young...
...GOLDEN NOTEBOOK, by Doris Lessing (567 pp.; Simon & Schuster; $5.95). In her twelfth book, British Novelist Doris Lessing copes with not just one literary chestnut but a whole treeful: the sexual odyssey of a bachelor girl, the political disillusionment of a onetime Communist, the maladjustment of the overeducated modern woman. She succeeds in creating a remarkable heroine (possibly her alter ego) who somehow manages believably to combine the qualities of Kitty Foyle, Arthur Koestler and Simone de Beauvoir. Like Mrs. Lessing, Heroine Anna Wulf is a divorced writer who explains, in four different notebooks, why she is too troubled...
...Zurich, where he died after more than 30 years of self-exile. The site was carefully chosen, for the opening scene of Ulysses is set there. So was the date, for June 16 was the 58th anniversary of "Bloomsday," the day of Leopold Bloom's 24-hour odyssey through "dear dirty Dublin" in the pages of Ulysses...
...almost sickly sweet saint who slipped effortlessly through life. In his last novel, Greece's late great Nikos Kazantzakis has restored agony of soul to the story of St. Francis. Like Jesus in Kazantzakis' The Last Temptation of Christ and Ulysses in his epic poem, The Odyssey, Francis struggles to shed earthly desires for a harder, truer life of the spirit...
...whole gamut of situations in Finney's cinematic odyssey is trite. There is the alley beat-up, the married woman knock-up, the beerhall cut-up and three henpecked husbands. At the end our hero ambles into the smoggy milltown sunset holding hands with a nice girl. It's all warmed over, but it tastes fine. Whether fishing on the proverbial riverbank or visiting his friendly neighborhood abortionist, Finney is obviously looking for a way to understand (and like) his life...