Word: reliefs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Tremendous Relief...
...trouble understanding the emotions I felt on hearing that the Viet Nam conflict was nearing an end [Feb. 5]. I did not feel like breaking out the champagne, but I did feel a tremendous relief. I echo the commentator who said it is not that something wonderful has happened; it is more a feeling that something terrible has finally ended...
...some drafty Darrowby barn and soaping up his arm to plunge it into one troubled animal orifice or another. For Herriot, and the reader, the rewards of such expeditions range from delivery of little nibbling creatures who sometimes get stuck in the process of being born, to the periodic relief administered to Tricki Woo, a pampered little Pekingese constantly overfed by her mistress. To be fair, though, as Herriot invariably is, the struggling assistant vet is every bit as susceptible to .the sherry and smoked oysters supplied him by Tricki's dowager owner...
...pages of this dizzy comic novel. After being ahead for long sections of the book, talent loses out only in the last chapters. There is a certain spectator interest to this peculiar struggle (Will Buckholz really blow the whole thing? Can he possibly save anything?). Still, it is a relief when the reader-and apparently the novelist-realizes that absolutely nothing in The Spanish Soldier is to be taken seriously, not even the pretensions...
...score, though, is unabashedly dramatic, or at least would like to be. Lacking Puccini's capacity for soaring anguish, Floyd can't pull his listeners out of themselves by their own heartstrings. Once the poisonous mediocrity of his characters' lives becomes vivid, one begins to long for relief from it, for an affirmative statement--any affirmative statement--a high flung vocal line, or a ringing trumpet call, or a verse of "Blow the Man Down." So that while Floyd's opera never completely loses our interest, it never grips it either...