Word: retold
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Bogs & Abundance. Heller's talent is impressive, but it also is undisciplined, sometimes luring him into bogs of boring repetition. Nearly every episode in Catch-22 is told and retold. With each telling, some new detail, some further revelation is dangled like a carrot for the reader who reads on and on until he feels like "The Soldier Who Saw Everything Twice" (the ironic title of one chapter). Heller fights a nip-and-tuck battle with the twin temptations of redundance and abundance, succumbs shamelessly to blatant gag writing until much of his dialogue resembles an old Smith & Dale...
...shape quickly as the story forms. At the end, amazingly often, what the reader takes away is not a mood, or a morsel of truth, or a flash of humor, but the whole story-characters, moods, truths and lies. This is so not only because the stories could be retold as good anecdotes, but because the author is a master illusionist who can create, as Hemingway did, an impression of absolute reality from the sparsest of materials...
...book of mine called This Way, Miss, I retold a story about Millionaire Otto Kahn and the hunchback wit, Marshall P. Walsh. The banker and the hunchback were walking along Fifth Avenue, and the banker, pointing to a Christian place of worship, said to the hunchback: "This is my church." The hunchback replied: "I thought you were a Jew." The banker said: "I was a Jew." The hunchback looked up at him, walked a few steps, stopped and looked up at the banker again and said: "You know, Mr. Kahn-I was a hunchback...
Greek Gods and Heroes, by Robert Graves. The only classicist who troubles himself to speak to the upper-middle intellectual class has disarmingly retold the myths and provided a Zeus for young readers...
Greek Gods and Heroes, by Robert Graves. The only classicist who troubles himself to speak to the upper-middle intellectual class has disarmingly retold the Greek myths for young readers...