Word: pritchetts
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MIDNIGHT OIL by V.S. PRITCHETT 271 pages. Random House...
This is the second and apparently the final volume in the autobiography of Britain's best literary critic as well as one of its wisest and sanest men of letters. Pritchett's elegant prose and range of knowledge might suggest that he is a product of a proud public school and Oxford. But in Volume 1, A Cab at the Door, he wrote of a decidedly lower-middle-class upbringing as the child of feckless and eccentric parents...
...ANADA. Paula Pritchett radiates a constant yet unmeditated seductiveness that drowns her rescuer in uncontrollable yearning. Kadar has exploited her dazzling beauty--and it is extraordinary--to project an indefinable combination of passivity and centripetal power. Reflecting the nuances and unsettling suggestions of the narrative, the camerawork moves from clear undisturbed landscapes to introspective shots of the mist-covered Danube. The symphonic soundtrack is occasionally over-dramatic, but mostly, it serves to reinforce Kadar's carefully composed ambiguities...
...only as a milieu but as a destiny. The characters he propelled through it were both its living parts and the fuel it consumed. Their hugeness, their stylization, their compulsive verbalizing are all in part a response to the pressures the city exerts on them. This, as Critic V.S. Pritchett has pointed out, is the kinship that urbanized modern readers have with them: a dependence on the "private, mythmaking faculty" by which people dramatize their existence in a mass society. It is a kinship with Dickens as well. In the 1970s more than ever, the feeling he once voiced...
...pride, he was an egoist writing about egoism. Thus the modern reader of his books is nearly suffocated by the presence of Mine Host, nudging, lecturing, possessed, as the novelist himself confessed, by the "cursed desire to show the reason." Nonetheless, it was Meredith's "splendid vanity," concludes Pritchett, that gave him the strength to put his contradictions on the line and struggle to resolve them. That, for Meredith, was what it meant to write a novel. The curse of self-consciousness may have made him hopelessly Victorian in manner. But that self-consciousness, deepened at best into self...