Word: proust
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This important new novel, second of a projected group of four, carries forward perhaps the most exhaustive study of love since Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. In the first volume, Justine (TIME, Aug. 26, 1957), Author Durrell, 46, brilliantly evoked the city of Alexandria, which has festered for 2,000 years between the sun-sparkling Mediterranean and the Egyptian desert. Balthazar covers the same terrain and time span as the first. It is as if the reader were making a return train journey through a landscape he had just crossed-only now he is sitting on the opposite...
Little read in the U.S., where his The Acceptance World (TIME, Feb. 20. 1956) sold only 2,000 copies, Novelist Powell (rhymes with Lowell) is highly regarded in his native Britain. Evelyn Waugh calls The Music of Time more realistic than Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, and much funnier. Powell's thesis is that blood is thicker than almost anything; his social unit is the family, not the individual. Says his fictional spokesman: "There is something overpowering, even a trifle sinister about very large families, the individual members of which often possess in excess the characteristics commonly...
...first page resembles Proust--what with tea-rooms, plumcakes, and the paste of sentiment. By page two, the narration switches to Gide's School of Sensitive Young Man Smelling Pressed Flower and Remembering Bath Tub Ring. There are three pages of Camus. And the rest of "The Bystander" slinks along in the ironic tradition of Colette and Francoise Sagan...
...paused in the shadow of Widener to apply a roll-on deodorant stick, and the past (like so much Proust) loomed up with the moist of memory. For four long years Portia had pursued the stuff and stench of animal husbandry. She had mastered the chemistry of manure and the physics of the plow. She had emerged from North Dakota Ag (crossing a calf with a jumping bean for ready-made cheese) summa cum laude. And all those years she had nourished a dream...
...Their most extraordinary act is to ask an audience for two lines of dialogue, then proceed to improvise a scene on the spot, using one line as the start and the other line as the end. Furthermore, they will produce the dialogue in any literary style the audience suggests-Proust or Erskine Caldwell, Li'l Abner or Samuel Beckett. (A Faulknerian bit by Elaine: "And there she was feeling her armpits-glad that they were there...