Word: prose
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...even terribly coherent manner about her situation. Other characters tell her that she may come to a bad end but do not say why. There is no fancy writing to divert the eye or the mind. Translator Ralph Manheim captures an English equivalent of Handke's German prose: dry, simple and spare, as if the author were trying to strip language of as much resonance as possible. Even forward momentum is thwarted; the story is chopped into segments, some hardly more than snippets: "On a cold morning the woman sat in a rocking chair on the terrace...
...which has provided no comfort for Argentina's pre-eminent master of poetry and prose, Jorge Luis Borges. Appalled at the prospect of weeks of soccer mania, he says he is leaving Buenos Aires for the World Cup duration. Usually a staunch Anglophile, Borges has even turned against the British. Why? "They have introduced stupidities such as football...
...conceits of her humdrum characters with a tartly satirical eye; in Maiden Newton, England. Warner met success early when her first novel (Lolly Willowes) became a premier selection by the fledgling U.S. Book-of-the-Month Club in 1926, but she showed an enduring talent with her genteel, Victorian prose (The Museum of Cheats, The Flint Anchor). A longtime contributor to The New Yorker, she also won acclaim as a poet (Time Importuned), a translator (Marcel Proust on Art and Literature 1896-1919) and a biographer (T.H. White...
Perhaps that is why the excerpts of Nixon's memoirs are so thoroughly and predictably disappointing. In a dull, clipped prose more reminiscent of Jerry Ford speaking off-the-cuff than his own roiling Pat Buchanan-William Safire speeches or football-fuck-em vernacular, nothing of the real Nixon emerges. The weird intensity, the paranoid desperation of the man who believed he always knew the right answer, and alone could act upon it, is gone. Instead, we are given a shallow, simplistic portrait of events, with the personality of the Great Vindictor sucked clean out of them. By contrast...
Hughes' book is interesting for the long quotations from Gardner about mystery writing. These are wise, and written with breathtaking authority. There is also an excellent 29-page bibliography. One suspects that Gardner would disapprove of the rest: the prim prose, the slapdash production (pages are numbered only fitfully; there is one flying leap from 186 to 204), the amateurish illustration. Gardner...