Word: retold
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Otherwise, The Ebony Tower is a book as lovely as its dust jacket?Pisanello's Portrait of a Lady. The retold tale of Eliduc, a 12th century Celtic romance, charmingly repeats the story of a knight torn between his love for a princess and his loyalty to his wife. A story called Poor Koko tells of a sort of casual Marxist burglar who amiably loots the guesthouse where a pedantic writer is staying, then, like a Manson of letters, coolly destroys the writer's notes and manuscript for a book about Thomas Love Peacock, a 19th century writer of burlesque...
...first section of the book, a set of biblical tales retold, Kolakowski puts the original ambiguities into the Marxist-Leninist idiom. While this sounds reductionist, the effect is quite the reverse. Kolakowski is so faithful to and concerned with the problematic paradox of Hebraic legend that he exaggerates the difficulties to the point where, for sheer ambivalence, his tales rival even the parables of Kafka. Translated into the lingo of current ideological strife, the Old Testament acquires an applicability most have long given up suspecting. To take his own best illustration, Kolakowski turns the story of Jacob and Esau into...
...member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade 100 years later. Repeatedly the author writes a scene that the reader is expected to follow in good faith, only to have Matthew, a chronic and helpless liar, admit that nothing of the sort ever happened. Then the incident is retold in terms of richer and yet more baroque untruth...
...last story I want to pass down is something I picked up third hand two months ago. It had to be retold to me because I forgot it. It may or may not be corrected, but the story goes, and I think it is a fitting ending, maybe in a sense a toast to The Crimson and to the Centennial that we've all been through the last two days. A Centennial which I might add I think from what people have said to me has meant more in an institutional way than any Harvard Reunion or office party every...
...immediacy and a love for detail of location and character that can only come from the deepest rapport with the subject matter. Comparisons have been made with Gone With the Wind, and snots have sniffed at the melodrama which can't be separated from the tenets of the retold crimes. No matter. There's heart to the work, and it starts to beat when the Don says "a man who can't spend time with his family is less than a whole man." Coppola takes off with a story in the grand tragic manner...