Word: short
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...SELECTED WORKS OF CESARE PAVESE. Four short novels by the life-shy but acutely observant Piedmontese who, since his suicide jn 1950 at 42, has become postwar Italy's most honored writer...
Deferred Sandwich. Short (5 ft. 6 in.) and portly, Cohen has a keen sense of the possible. With an eye on the generation ahead, he has always been willing, if necessary, to sacrifice cherished legislative objectives so long as he gets at least a small piece of what he wants. This morsel, Cohen believes, can be fattened a little year by year until eventually the legislation resembles what he wanted in the first place. An aide calls his technique "salami slicing." One slice does not amount to much, but eventually there is enough for a sandwich...
Fighter Through the Mouth. The novels are almost naive in their simplicity. The Beach is an incident involving the tug of war between the sexes in a pointless marriage. Two seemingly compatible people are brought down by a typical Pavese monster: ennui. Not much here, but short and clean; no wasted words. The House on the Hill has bigger aims. Pavese was an anti-Fascist who was put in prison by the Mussolini regime, and then exiled to Calabria. Actually, he failed to do much more than sympathize with those who risked their lives. He was a fighter through...
...Half-Past Nine) constitutes a school of his own. His writing skills seem at first oldfashioned, but they always turn out to be just right for hitting his targets: hypocrisy, his countrymen's haste to forget the Hitlerite period, the greed of the fat-cat crowd. In this short caper, set in today's Rhineland, a German army Jeep is burned by an intelligent young soldier with the active help of his equally intelligent father. The act is deliberate and they offer no defense at their trial. German courtroom justice, the army, the press and small-town morality...
...documentary sequences chop up the story, and though Lelouch has tried to fashion a rope, all we get is a few strands loosely wound together. The story itself stops and starts like a temperamental machine; incidents last too long, making their point several times over, while others are cut short. But where it goes, the film is sometimes eloquent, sometimes hilarious, sometimes magnificent...