Word: paradoxical
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...PARADOXICAL, you might say, to begin at the end. But then, Gardner revels in paradox. In fact, his poem is not actually poetry at all. In the deep recesses of the classical unrhymed hexameter narrative lurks the novelist's imagination, concerned more with mechanics than pure, precise wordsway. John Gardner cannot deny his place in the traditional world of Henry James and the Novel of Ideas. Jason and Medeia affirms that fact once more...
...first section of the book, a set of biblical tales retold, Kolakowski puts the original ambiguities into the Marxist-Leninist idiom. While this sounds reductionist, the effect is quite the reverse. Kolakowski is so faithful to and concerned with the problematic paradox of Hebraic legend that he exaggerates the difficulties to the point where, for sheer ambivalence, his tales rival even the parables of Kafka. Translated into the lingo of current ideological strife, the Old Testament acquires an applicability most have long given up suspecting. To take his own best illustration, Kolakowski turns the story of Jacob and Esau into...
That ingenious paradox Collier is not about to accept. If the Fall is a tragedy, Collier feels, as petulantly as the veriest college sophomore, then God is to blame. He was running the show, wasn't he? Even more fashionably, Collier looks on the Fall of Man as a liberation -from timeless, static perfection into the rich, brothy, changeful world of guilt and death, of love and squalor...
...fictional species-a novel about a person who happens to be a woman. Sexual politics, job rights-the whole shebang-have less immediacy for 31-year-old Elizabeth Kamen than the fact that she is a daughter, a granddaughter and one of millions of people caught in that ancient paradox, the human family. Parents love their children but do not know how to nudge them out of the nest without causing serious damage. Children love their parents but cannot leave gracefully...
...cruel paradox, a painter who was the master of visual sensation-able to pack more concrete feeling of weight, rotation, sharpness, elasticity and vibration, color or smell into a shape than any other man of his time-found himself, at the end, painting with only the most tenuous relationship to the world...