Word: plotlessly
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Zorba the Greek resists easy definition. Like the Odyssey and Don Quixote, it is nearly plotless but never pointless. Like the heroes of those fictional sagas, its hero, Alexis Zorba, casts a larger shadow on the world than the world does...
MacLeish was right. Though almost plotless and seldom dramatic, Stephania is a mature study of life in a hospital for the handicapped. Stephania, her body tortured by the Nazis and her mind churning with memories of horror, upsets the placid routine of the two other patients in Room No. 5. Desperately intent on having her crippled body reshaped, she has neither understanding nor sympathy for the resignation of the paralyticThura or the gross self-indulgence of Fröken Nilsson, who has overeaten to the point where her broken leg cannot support her porcine body...
Hemingway's Snows of Kilimanjaro starts with a terse and inscrutable paragraph about a dead leopard atop a snow-clad African mountain. That paragraph stopped 20th Century Fox dead in its tracks. Faced with the problem of going along with an essentially plotless and often unfathomable character study or scrapping it for a more conventional plot, 20th Century screenwriter solved it by choosing neither and writing in a mass of extras and animals instead. The result is a spectacular mudflat of a film, neither good Hemingway nor good...
...fiction, Ross was never as sure of his touch-or The New Yorker's-as he was on fact. He ceaselessly searched for new authors, helped them develop new ways of telling stories, liked them plotless. But he was not always sure what the often neurotic, atmospheric stories were about. Once he grumbled: "I'm never going to buy another story I don't understand...
...people she loved rushed at her as much for vengeance as for grief, almost like wolves into the circle of a dying fire that had drawn them yet filled them with fear. In a fitful half-light of awareness, the characters of Brendan Gill's soft-moving, almost plotless novel rip tooth & nail at the memory of Elizabeth-at each other for possession of it, and finally each at himself in remorse for the dried smallness of his own loveless heart...