Word: saint
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Like Samuel Butler's Erewhon, Thomas Berger's principality of Saint Sebastian can be found on no map, but its significance will be clear to any reader with a sufficiently jaundiced eye. Tucked away in Middle Europe, somewhere between Johann Strauss's Vienna and Kafka's Prague, the country subsists on a precarious economy of universal credit. Politics and journalism are against the law; pederasty is condoned, but rudeness is considered a crime against the state. The government bureaucracy includes the absurdly named Ministry of Clams, a sort of dead-letter office for all insoluble problems, whose minister believes that...
...cheat and dissemble: spying should be just your meat." Wren goes off to more of a welcome than he bargains for from Olga, the Amazonian ringleader of the Liberation Front, and less help than he needs from Clyde McCoy, American drunk and pornographer, the Firm's resident operative in Saint Sebastian...
Pritchett's best-known novel is "Mr. Beluncle," first published in 1951, and his famous short stories include "The Fly in the Ointment," and "The Saint...
...written rich, lyric dialogue for the leads: a budding writer (Jonathan Hogan) who is diagnosed as having the disease, and a former lover (Jonathan Hadary) who takes him back "as is" to nurse him. During the play's earlier off-Broadway run, Hadary played the lover as a near saint, but has now toned down the sanctimony and emphasizes the character's wit. Hogan must storm through the show on a single note approaching hysteria. Yet he manages to find great variety, shading and humor in the role, and delivers the most powerful performance of the Broadway season...
...Christianity. But he is also built to carry a good deal of symbolic weight. "What is moving in his story," writes Hersey, "what may in the end be thought to redeem the obvious failure of his mission in China, is his lifelong struggle to subdue the greater but sicker saint in himself and give himself to a more modest state of being: one of balance, sanity, serenity and realized human love in the face of a shifting and violent and mostly hateful world...