Word: remus
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Baby, like the rabbit bait in the Uncle Remus tale, is the sort of novel one can get stuck on. The fox is the author. Morrison, whose Song of Solomon (1977) won the National Book Critics Circle award for fiction, blends elements of racial identity, assimilation and Caribbean folklore with an old-fashioned lady-and-the-truck-driver romance. Can sophisticated Jadine and her black diamond in the rough make it, even after he has a haircut and borrows a Hickey Freeman suit? Or will Ryk, a rich somebody, lure her back to Paris by sending her a sealskin coat...
...story was not fogged in myth, like that of Romulus and Remus; it occurred in the bright morning sun of the Enlightenment, with a generation of astonishingly literate men in attendance. From a distance of 100 years, Henry Adams, normally a man of elegant bitterness, looked back at that primal national moment: "Stripped for the hardest work, every muscle firm and elastic, every ounce of brain ready for use, and not a trace of superfluous flesh on his nervous and supple body, the American stood in the world a new order...
...this attractive intellectual to bed. Ivan is in no hurry; he charms and tantalizes her with food, wine and graceful erudition. Rather than toss coins in a fountain, he guides her to the Campidoglio to see the caged she-wolf, symbol of the mythical beast that suckled Romulus and Remus. The animal, "glowering from slate-gray eyes that looked at once treacherous and ready to weep," suddenly howls in their faces...
...several of Greene's other novels, it is not any overwhelming personal sense of justice that prompts Castle to spill the "Uncle Remus" plans to the Russians. ("I don't know what justice means," Castle snaps at one point.) It is rather his lingering sense of gratitude toward his dead friend Carson, along with the requisite twinge of guilt, and his feeling that out of his love for Sarah he should help save her people from suffering. A Greene character would never make such a courageous gesture out of ideological conviction; although this is perhaps just as well, given...
...that Greene means through this novel to justify in a roundabout way the defection in the '60s of his good friend, Kim Philby. But if we take Castle's side, it is largely because the British superiors he defies in the book come off as such cardboard villains. "Uncle Remus," conceivable even now, is done here too baldly to be believed. It is also a bit much that the heads of British intelligence meet over lunch and after shooting parties, to discuss plans for liquidation and trout fishing with the same clubbish joviality. It becomes all too easy to understand...