Word: saturnalian
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...title does, after all, describe the book perfectly; the three novellas are linked thematically by it. More precisely, it is the breaking of search and seizure laws. Elkin's heros are badmen, who justify their acts through mixed-up metaphysical rules reflecting all of the saturnalian immediacy of today's politics. At the same time, they express deeper strains of human nature which will ensure Elkin's place among the best of modern novelists...
...modern writer resist returning to the Greek myths to explore their endless, labyrinthine paths and to remap their ambiguous meanings into the maze of the twentieth century? The myths are so rich in tragedy, epic lives, passionate ideals, saturnalian revelry, and comic twists of fate that they beg for modernization. Claiming such undertakings to be bastardizations, staid classicists might curse the lack of inspiration, the sterility of these transformations. "Myths," said Camus, "are made for the imagination to breathe life into them." John Gardner's epic poem, Jason amd Medeia shows that the modern imagination, violently panting while it makes...