Word: prosaic
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...incapable of being confined to any one theme. His dazzling prose and exquisite reworking of oft-prosaic themes reflect a formidable talent, harnessed in the service of sheer pleasure as well as intellectual challenge...
...when artistic discourse has tended to be nasty, brutish and short- winded, Olivier Messiaen's musical grands projects stand apart from -- and largely above -- the works of his more prosaic mid-century contemporaries. Devoutly Catholic, the French composer was blessed with a pagan sense of muscular rhythm and luminous color. Highly intellectual, he was also irredeemably mystical, taking an almost childlike pleasure in the sounds of nature, especially bird song. He followed no "ism" and founded no school, but Messiaen, who died in April at 83, looms as one of the century's giants...
...Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, aspires to no less than a history of the U.S., spanning two centuries in seven hours. If his view of the past is cruel, his factual grounding is solid. But what makes the work so hauntingly memorable is a poetic impulse, not a prosaic one. He confines the action to the same few hundred acres of his ancestral Cumberlands, telling a nation's story in terms of feelings for that patch of land among three families intertwined by treachery and revenge. Warner Shook's staging vividly mixes ritual and realism. While Schenkkan...
...novel will neither surprise nor disappoint readers familiar with Frayn's most recent work, The Trick of It. Like most of his plays, novels, and screenplays, A Lnading on the Sun is a comic work of light, unassuming wit, tempered with the author's usual quiet sense of the prosaic tragedy of life. Frayn's greatest strength rests in his talent at reconciling humor and sadness, and he achieves this rapprochement in the book with gentle facility...
...winningly at a type of comedy that seems particular to the British. But what is important and moving in A Landing on the Sun, and what most likely won it Britain's most valuable fiction prize, the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award, is its profound sense of prosaic tragedy. The laughing stops abruptly at the end of A Landing on the Sun, and in this breathless transition Michael Frayn succeeds magnificently...