Word: prose
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...well-confused story, making even his stock characters interesting--the butler wonderfully antique, the rich Messerschmann intriguingly reduced to eating nothing but noodles, "without butter and without salt." Fry, in translating and adapting Anouilh's orignal L'invitation au chateau, left the dramatic action intact but colored up the prose considerably, at the same time avoiding any over-fanciful flights of words. Only in the third act, when there is too much emphasis on the tired theme of how awful it is to be rich, does the dialogue seem labored...
...beautifully told parable of South Africa's present condition, and proves, if nothing more, that a racial crisis-like that of adolescence-can produce the good prose of a young man from the pimples of apartheid. Racial strain seems to have made of many South African writers experts with the twisted threads of human intercourse...
...milling cast of characters is a queen of Naples whose appetite for men is inextinguishable. Pretending to be interested in Italian political squabbles, Author Thayer really saves his most conspicuous talents for scenes that normally have their origin in lecherous fantasy. A drool trickles from the wiseguy, smoking-car prose, and each orgy is dropped with a reluctance that promises another bout in the next chapter. The promise is kept, to the point of bedroom boredom...
...story after story (these 42 represent the best of four collections O'Flaherty has written), O'Flaherty spells out in the arithmetic of prose what the great Yeats, said in the algebra of poetry...
...help his private anguish. But in the end, most are beyond revenge or anguish. At first this seems just another war novel beginning with "knavery rubbing elbows with horror in this louse-ridden cesspool under the hill of death." Slowly, the reader comes to know through Ledig's prose, which shows its simple structure like a field-stripped carbine, why this book has been bought in tens of thousands by Germans. There are few names, and even the scene is one of those anonymous "inhabited places" that appeared in Russian war communiqués, as featureless as its invaders...