Word: sexuality
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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LUST IS THE metaphor for the human condition in Philip Roth's novel, The Professor of Desire. His story of a young man's effort to arrive at sexual and romantic happiness is funny, written with a pungent Rabelasian wit, but marked by an underlying not of wistfulness. He portrays a dissatisfation almost inherent in living, the incompatibility of passion and peace and the transcience of happiness...
David Kepesh, the hero of Roth's novel, is a scholar of literature and lust. "Studious by day, dissolute by night" is David's motto although his career as a sexual prodigy only begins after he has won a Fullbright to study in London. There he meets two Swedish girls; Elizabeth, loving and sweet, and Birgitta, daring and wildly lascivious. The choice is between the hearth or the furnace and, characteristically, David wants both. For a while Kepesh manages to have that but Elizabeth flees the menage a trois and David eventually breaks with Birgitta, recoiling from the destructiveness...
MISS MARGARIDA'S WAY by Roberto Athayde When the letter E is reached on the hurricane list, the storm should be named Estelle. As the teacher of the play's title, Estelle Parsons portrays a woman of blistered paranoia and feverish sexual frustration who qualifies as a blackboard Himmler to an eighth-grade biology class...
Sillitoe contrasts his military prowess and civilian naivete through his sexual initiation with two sisters. His treatment of the two shop girls and their family is both comic and penetrating. Later, when retired colonel Scorton manages a bowling and billiards hall, Sillitoe again shows his feel for common people through his description of the clintele. His portrait of Scorton's underling, named Oxton, is the book's best characterization. The retired gunner is a lovable bachelor dependent on the need to serve...
Never having had a sister, mother or female friends in military school, he believes the older soldier's explaination of sex as "shoving your cock into a tin of worms." His responses to women are sexual and unemotional until he meets the brigadier's daughter. Then Scorton's emotional intensity seems somewhat inconsistent with his previous behavior. The stormy relationship with his wife, which takes on all the atmosphere and language of a battle, lacks the same color and strength of his dalliance with the two sisters...