Word: proust
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Powell's world is special, as special as Proust's. In Evelyn Waugh's much-quoted observation, Powell has even been rated Proust's equal-with the qualification that he is much funnier. All the best jokes are family jokes, and the British Establishment is one of the closest of all cultural families. One no more needs to be a member of it to relish Anthony Powell than one needs to be a French homosexual with aristocratic friends to enjoy Proust. Like the peculiar British fondness for cold toast, though, a taste for Powell...
Echoes From Heroes. In some ways, the book is a compendium of fashionably youthful flaws. Both illusive and allusive, it is often ultra-literary in just the wrong sort of way-full of echoes from the author's literary heroes, T. S. Eliot, Proust and Truman Capote. There are also resonances from Joseph Heller. One can imagine Heller's Captain Yossarian, sitting up there in the sky, cursing the night, as the U.S. Air Force drops a bomb in the garden that Arlecq recollects from his own childhood. "It is still a good eight weeks till Easter," Fries...
Updike's prose is, like Proust's, imbued with a sense of loss, with a profound perception of the evanescence of things, analogous to Piet's fear of death. It is this that drives Updike to greater and greater feats of observation. Everything, all the world's shapes and colors, must be preserved in words, as in amber, against its eventual decay and disappearance...
Unlike France, thinks Rees, England has lacked a novelist of the stature of Proust to make the homme-femme a credible figure in English society. Nor does he expect a rash of revelations to follow his disclosure. "This is a frightfully sensitive subject," he says, "and those people who are most able to say are the least likely to do so." Rees insists he is not mounting an attack on homosexuality as such. "I want simply to know how important it was and what influence it did have." He is moderately encouraged by the fact that the form the current...
...Edith M. Hull's The Sheik. Sinclair Lewis' great period piece, Babbitt, did make the first ten, sharing last place with a forgotten field of corn called Helen of the Old House, by Harold Bell Wright. It is salutary to note that the first English translation of Proust's Swanris Way did not make the scene...