Word: pocus
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...HOCUS POCUS by Kurt Vonnegut; Putnam; 302 pages...
...quick, it was said, to detect the smell of society's insulation burning -- and to sigh "So it goes" -- when there was nothing more in the air than, say, a harmless whiff from a distant war or the neighborhood toxic-waste dump. No more; his news in Hocus Pocus is that our charred insulation no longer smolders. It has burned itself out, and civilization's great, tired machine is not dying, but blackened and dead...
...author's standby, the diary of a bemused old man who has survived civilization's downfall. Perhaps because of this resemblance to his other books, or simply because the freight of anger and disgust is so heavy it upsets the novel's balance, the element of Hocus Pocus that is storytelling seems perfunctory. Eugene Debs Hartke is the diarist, a gung-ho U.S. Army officer during the Vietnam War; then a professor of science at Tarkington, a college for dyslectics in New York State; then briefly the warden of a prison for blacks into which the college is transformed...
This proclivity towards the effusive is Wilson's biggest problem and it culminates in an illconceived and startling ending. The ghosts which haunt the past of the characters in The Piano Lesson literally come to life in a hocus-pocus scene which is badly out of step with the simple poetry of the production. Wilson seems to believe so fiercely in the powers of imagination that he is ultimately trapped by them. He's a visionary, poetic playwright and at times his vision seems to over-whelm...
...status mattered in a heatwave." Remarks like that, the hallmark of Francoise Sagan's simple, wayward charm, occur often enough to make this slight tale worth a couple of summer hours. Maybe it should be read at night, out of doors with a flashlight, because it is essentially hocus-pocus about oversexed Resistance workers in the early days of the German Occupation. Alice and Jerome, both bright, attractive and world weary, have a glum affair going. Seeking a hideout for their efforts to help Jews, they descend on his friend Charles, who lives in a quiet town. Of course Alice...