Word: plotless
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...before a reader has finished the book he realizes that The Years is well named. It is not so much the story of a particular family as it is the story of how time passes-or seems to pass; recurs-or seems to recur. In Virginia Woolf's plotless pattern there seems to be an inkling, a suggestion, a flash, of what time may mean. The effectiveness of her method, which she has been evolving for 15 years, is that it gives the reader this feeling of being abroad in space and time. The sense of time elapsing which...
...seeks to repeat Sergeant Grischa's case in terms of the Western Front. Perhaps because its inhumanly terrible story is not so concentrated, the sympathy it arouses is more diffused, less trenchant. Perhaps any plot based on human relationships loses much of its poignancy when staged before the plotless chaos of Verdun; the scenes readers will find most memorable are the ones in which that impersonally erupting background is most to the fore...
...Death in the Woods," plotless, atmospheric, describes the memory of finding an old woman frozen to death in the snow. '"The Return" tells how a man came back to his home town years later, and how he was glad to run away from it the same night. In "The Fight" two respectable, middle-aged cousins who have never liked each other finally have the fistfight they should have got out of their systems when they were boys. Having given and received a black eye, a bloody nose, they part in silent enmity. "John thought his cousin Alfred never...
...Brown of Culver (Universal) has nothing to do with the famed English story of school life, Tom Brown's School Days, by Thomas Hughes. Tom Brown of Culver is named for Boy Actor Tom Brown. It is a relatively plotless, episodic picture of life at Culver Military Academy in Indiana...
...Says Arnold Bennett, booster of books, preferably British: "Her Privates We will be remembered when All Quiet on the Western Front . . . is forgotten." Like the German novel, Her Privates We is a record of personal experiences in the trenches, as the plain soldier knew them. It too is plotless, simple narrative, un-propagandist, unrhetorical. Its author has preferred to remain anonymous. Says "Private 19022": "The events described actually happened; the characters are fictitious." He tells of the fighting on the Somme and Ancre fronts during the last part of 1916; his characters are a company of an English regiment...