Word: pritchetts
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...EDGE OF THE CLIFF by V.S. Pritchett Random House; 179 pages...
This has never happened to V.S. Pritchett, who, on the threshold of his 80th year, writes as passionately as ever. Talent, discipline and enjoyment keep the juices flowing; recognition helps. Knighted hi 1975, Sir Victor is generally regarded as the best literary journalist working both sides of the Atlantic. His two-volume autobiography, A Cab at the Door and Midnight Oil, are quiet marvels of English prose and self-appraisal, and his stories have accrued into a body of major work...
...laconic, seemingly impersonal surfaces of Pritchett's stories give off a surprising amount of animal heat. It is a matter of design, craftsmanship and, as the author has written, "the supreme pleasure of putting oneself in by leaving oneself out." The technique requires the placement of the precise detail at the exact emotional distance, and it gave his autobiography the immediacy of his fiction. Here, for example, is that extraordinary passage from Midnight Oil in which Pritchett describes one of the more dramatic consequences of his father's exasperating personality: "He had no notion of what...
...Many Pritchett fictions deal with styles of preserving one's dignity. How does an aging botanist confront the energies of his lovely 25-year-old companion? Carefully, as the author illustrates in the title story of his latest collection: "There are rules for old men who are in love with young girls, all the stricter when the young girls are in love with them. It has to be played as a game." Love, of course, is never a game, especially in a December-May romance where the older party keeps one eye on the clock and the younger does...
...Pritchett, Litt.D., literary critic...