Word: readers
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Advocate's April issue contains one poem which is not merely an experiment, but is also a poem-for-readers. Richard Sommer's "Three Legends for Fishes" is the finished product of a competent craftsman, and makes the rest of the issue seem unusually amateurish. Although "Legends" would not deserve the American Academy Poetry Prize which Sommer has won in his second year of graduate school, the poem nevertheless shows a consideration for the reader which is conspicuously absent from the work of most younger writers, including the other three contributors to this issue...
...this halfway point, the reader begins to see clearly what Swiss Novelist Frisch is up to, i.e., a sort of Franz Kafka's Castle in reverse. In the Kafka fable, the modern hero struggled to gain entry into an official world that denied his existence; in I'm Not Stiller, he struggles to deny the existence that the same world imposes on him. And, as in The Castle, the setting and characters in I'm Not Stiller may be understood symbolically as well as really. Sam's "prison" is his own fear. The "border" at which...
...most unsympathetic foreigner would hesitate to paint such a venomous rogues' gallery of Italians, but the reader's conviction is likely to be that Novelist Moravia has drawn his straight from life. After Mussolini's return to power in 1943 as a Nazi puppet, Moravia, who had been editing an anti-Fascist magazine, hid out for nine months "in a pigsty on top of a mountain'' near Monte Cassino. For chapters on end, readers of Two Women may feel that they are doing the same...
What is strong and moving about Two Women stems from the unblinking Italian taste for realismo and Author Moravia's vividly tactile imagery, which makes the reader smart with the sting of his heroines' indignities. What is weak and irritating is Leftist Moravia's implicit conviction that war is really a bloody reprise of the class struggle. The only emotion more persuasive than pity that he displays in Two Women is self-pity. When it comes to man's fate-the tragedy that lies too deep for tears-Moravia, the master weeper, refuses to open...
...child's imagination and romantic thirst for life, brought into play for the first time when the madman's own imagination reaches out in sympathy and need. Conventionally, this ominous encounter ends well after a long spell of breath-holding on the part of the reader as well as the parents. But its bitterly ironic aftertaste lies in the fact that the parents' agony is not enough to induce forgiveness for their failure to know their own child. ¶Tho' the Pleasant Life Is Dancing Round tries to show how even exterior happiness may fail...