Word: passional
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Gordimer's prose, brutal in its precision and sensuousness, conveys Rosa's struggle with an immediacy that makes detachment impossible. She bombards us with images harsh and lush; passion for the country whose policies she hates scorches the pages, evoking South Africa's beauty, sordidness and terror. She moves from the overripe living room of an apartheid apologist to the stinking hut in a black township, from the lucid vigor of South Africa to the luxury of the Rivieva. Her prose mimics the near-cryptic, emotionally loaded economy of poetry, with all its symbolic richness. Reading this book is almost...
...pleasure so well, and Rand's own pleasure was directly proportionate to what he was able to give. The two of them together, he thought, were like compound turbines increasing each other's rpm reciprocally until they went through the red line and fused from the heat of a passion that exceeds human design limits...
...time without sacrificing national significance. The selection of Madison was a wise one since, as Barry A. Brown put it, "Everything happened in Madison, from the smallest protest to the biggest bombing." The War at Home chronicles the history of the anti-war movement and captures some of its passion and humanity...
Young love is a fanaticism inhabiting a region somewhere between the silly and the metaphysical. Scott Spencer understands the territory well: its shimmering landscapes, its enclosing solipsism, the profound and dippy magic by which children suddenly acquire passion. In Endless Love, the mother of one such adolescent says in rueful retrospect: "We felt as if we'd given a child permission to experiment with a little chemistry set only to find she was an undiscovered genius-solving ancient alchemical riddles, bonding once incompatible molecules, filling the cellar with luminous smoke...
...does in others, after a time. If my mind could have made a sound, it would have burst a row of wineglasses. I saw coincidences everywhere; meanings darted and danced like overheated molecules." Spencer's tensely energetic prose catches perfectly the lyricism and bombast of single-minded passion. It also registers some sweet and extraordinarily complicated moments involving David and his parents, stolid ex-Communists painfully falling out of love with each other. After the fire, forbidden by a court ever to see the Butterfields again, David secretly begins tracking them down-in New York, then in Vermont...