Word: shepherdess
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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What he craved was neither luxury nor the high rhetoric of history painting, but apprehensible truth, visible, familiar, open to touch and repetition. The truth about an onion could be tested again and again; the truth about a Versailles shepherdess was, to put it mildly, more labile...
...rack outside it. This piece of mock primitivism was intended to say something about survival, in homage to the fishermen of the Po delta; but since the tuna was not caught by the artist but bought in the Venice fishmarket, the project looked vicarious, like Marie Antoinette playing shepherdess. What it had to do with art was anyone's guess. But then, art is a matter of context. It is what you find in a Biennale...
...historical novels set between the World Wars. In The Fox in the Attic (1962), the first volume, England, Germany and the rise of Hitler are seen through the eyes of a young aristocratic liberal, who continues to observe and philosophize about the politics of power in The Wooden Shepherdess (1973). At the time of his death, Hughes was working on the final volume of the trilogy...
...real decisions are impossible, LaZebnik's emphasis on immediate satisfaction of the appetites--in this case, hunger--makes a certain kind of sense. Nevertheless, there's only so much humor to be squeezed from a pear that turns out to be someone's fiance, or from a shepherdess blowing on a banana. And what's only vaguely amusing the first time around hardly improves with repetition...
Well, one thing that presumably is going to happen to him is World War II. When it does, in some subsequent volume, perhaps the relevance of all that seems diffuse and maundering in Shepherdess will come clear. Perhaps the grand design that prompted some reviewers to invoke Tolstoy when Fox was published will emerge again. But Hughes is 73, and a painfully slow writer. When he conceived his ambitious project he had only two novels to his credit: the minor classic A High Wind in Jamaica (1929) and In Hazard (1935). He took 17 years of research and writing...