Word: passional
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...about herself. In the revealing and brilliant title essay, she describes a list of articles she packs when traveling. She meticulously follows the list, but always forgets her watch. She shamefacedly asks people for the time every half hour until she resorts to calling her husband at home. Her passion for asserting control, for putting things--and herself--in order is always foiled...
...PASSION PLAY by Jerzy Kosinski; St. Martin's Press; 271 pages...
...Passion Play, Kosinski's seventh novel, the man's name is Fabian. But in essence he is the bloodless Levanter of Blind Date (1977), the vengeful wanderer Tarden of Cockpit (1975) and the haunted boy in Kosinski's first and best fiction, The Painted Bird. Fabian differs from his predecessors chiefly in occupation: he is a competitive horseman. The aging jockey plays a strange sort of polo - a one-on-one contest in which animal and rider become a single figure jousting on a timeless range. Like many equestrians, Kosinski's rider is graceful on horseback...
...Fabian's mobile VanHome is seldom without its lady for the evening. Adolescents, sophisticates, even transsexuals are all given equal time. Yet the warning sign on Fabian's van says more about its owner than about the alarm system: SELF-REACTOR: AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. In this picaresque, passion is reserved for the playing field. Despite his experiments with sex and drugs, Fabian truly gets high on Fabian. With characteristic insouciance, the author describes his hero's liaisons: "He found himself selecting, isolating, soliciting partners as transient and avid as himself, as ready to initiate, as willing...
...novel and makes a few paragraphs indistinguishable from Harold Robbins at the gallop: "When she arrived, the flare of her seductive allure would be in full glow, the meld of her sexuality fired by the challenge of another woman." Fortunately, Kosinski's kinks are a minor portion of Passion Play. The reader who can get past horse-and-lady scenes that bear no relation to International Velvet will be rewarded with passages of great force...