Word: protagonist
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...protagonist from someone else's novel...
...suggests Tarden, the protagonist of Jerzy Kosinski's Cockpit. If Tarden is indeed a creature from some other writer's galaxy, that author is manifestly Dostoyevsky. For like his predecessor, Kosinski explores the classic antinomies of rationality-and of experience that defeats reason and mocks humanity...
...weakens. Though Kosinski ends with a paragraph from The Possessed, the brilliant Polish exile reaches the depths, not the peaks, of his Russian master. At Dostoyevsky's most pathological, he still illuminated his worst sinners, sometimes with anguished faith, sometimes with a grieving moral sense. Kosinski's protagonist views sex as a corrosive, never as delight or even consolation; for Tarden, all other characters exist as so many laboratory animals awaiting his stimulus...
...drinking straight gin. Carson was hardly into her 20s when she suffered the first of several strokes. Anemia, pleurisy, a rheumatic heart and cancer followed in lethal succession. She was afflicted with a melodramatic bisexuality, a condition that made her fall in love with husbands and wives. Like the protagonist in her story A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud, she could say: "Son, I can love anything." Nevertheless, Biographer Carr judges, she preferred women. Her often unrequited infatuations ranged from Isak Dinesen to Marilyn Monroe. "I was born a man," Carson once declared with a peculiar amalgam of imagination...
...light of the illuminating new Boris mounted by the Metropolitan last winter (TIME, Dec. 30) and based on Mussorgsky's original version, one can question the Bolshoi's steadfast adherence to the gaudy Rimsky-Korsakov re-orchestration. The Met-Mussorgsky rendering makes Boris the protagonist in a true psychological drama; the Bol-shoi-Rimsky production, virtually unchanged for 28 years, makes him more the central figure in a historical pageant. His fellow 17th century Russians emerge, as it were, frieze-dried...