Word: shapelessly
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Hard Information. Her new book contains some bits of hard information in what many will regard as a large (444 pages) and shapeless piece of sentimentalism. For example, it dispels the myriad rumors about the fate of Stalin's infamous secret police chief, Lavrenty Beria. One persistent story has it that he was shot or strangled by his colleagues at a meeting of the Politburo right after Stalin's death. Setting the record straight, Svetlana repeats that General A. A. Vishnevsky, chief surgeon of the Soviet Army, told her that Beria was summarily tried in 1953, held...
Kunen's wit captures this shapeless but intense anger very lucidly, and while his book is far from the last word on radicals, it is as sharp a statement of radical disgust with liberals as one can hope to find. With great glee, Kunen relates second-hand The Ad Hoc Faculty Sandwich Decision -- a scenario in which votes have been taken, dissident factions reconciled and the body has determined how it will mediate the battle between jocks blocking off the entrance to an occupied building and any protestors trying to pass in food. Kunen discovers the trouble with the liberals...
...Kremlin or the Pentagon but "competitive Individualism, bee-like or antlike Communism, and tribal-minded Nationalism." Such things, Toynbee argues, are responsible for creating "a Boyg-like smog of impersonal relations." Readers of Ibsen's Peer Gynt are expected to recall that the great Boyg is a shapeless cloud "neither dead nor alive; all slime and mistiness." There is really no way to get at Boyg; he "doesn't strike" and prefers to "get all he wishes by gentleness." Ibsen's folk hero Peer is softly enveloped and nearly driven mad. "Oh, for claws and teeth that...
Such native stylistic ploys, like poetry, suffer dreadfully even in the best of translations, and this one, by Barbara Bray, is much too stiff-lipped, too unbendingly British. Ultimately, what does Le Clézio in, is his decision to mirror his Life-is-shapeless-and-meaningless view in its own terms. All arbitrary mood and no movement can't help making for a dull book. "Nothing is necessary any more," concludes the non-hero cryptically as he is being buried. "But neither is anything unnecessary." That phlegmatic formulation ought to come as some sort of wan, stoical triumph...
...could go, and, as he looked, people toppled slowly and fell like ninepins, full length on the pavement, like big cardboard boxes being dropped. . . . The acute angle of the horizon, squeezed between the houses, hurtled toward him. Beneath his feet it was night. A night of black cotton wool, shapeless and inorganic, while the sky was colorless, a ceiling, one more acute angle...