Word: polos
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...teaches fear-of-flying and sex therapy sessions and an interview with a paper-trained puppy that writes a weekly column for the Miami Herald (In His Own Words), People magazine tells us where Jerzy Kosinski hangs out: dingy streets, sex clubs, hospital operating rooms, and polo fields. I thought once that Jerzy Kosinski had the most fantastic and bizarre imagination of any American writer. Lurid episodes splatter his pages, rapes of village nymphs by jealous peasant women with rake handles and broken bottles and remote-control murders on Swiss ski slopes. Yet if People can be trusted, Kosinski...
...Kosinski idles away his non-writing time indulging in the extravagance of the ultra-rich; the result is Passion Play. Kosinski writes of possessed and spirited men jousting with civilized culture--Don Quixotes turned competent. Introduced as the world's pre-eminent polo player, Fabian, Passion Play's knight errant, is first found scrounging around New York City for a practice field. His dominant talent and penchant for revenge have driven him from the plush meadows of polo estates. Playing one on one matches with wealthy opponents, writing books about the dangers of horse-back riding, living on a retainer...
Passion Play chronicles the spectacular incidents frantically about chronological time: the swing of a polo mallet revives the memory--the images, glints and scents--of the same action many years before...
Fabian will one day die, alone, and this fact torments him. He sees middle age in every mirror. When his body does fail him, his passionate courtship of polo will end. Without the opportunity to excel, without the ability to mount a pony and fly victorious across a manicured field, without all this Fabian's life need not continue. Hence, the books Fabian has written (he too is an author) warn of the dangers of horsemanship--there's no blithe extolling of the joys of riding here. Indeed, Kosinski--Fabian's creator--himself carries poison with him at all times...
...whether his unparalleled ear for language and his eye for social nuance are to be used solely for elaborations of the same theme. For the past several books, Kosinski has been as aimless as his characters who believe that the going is the goal. That is not true for polo. It is even less so for novelists, even gifted ones. -Stefan Kanfer