Word: snowing
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...SNOW WHITE, by Donald Barthelme. A zany, explosive adult version of the old fairy tale, told with Joycean zest by a gifted young (36) anarchist in the world of words...
...Switzerland from India in March, someone gave her a copy of Doctor Zhivago in Russian. It was, she is sure, no coincidence, but an act of fate. Soon immersed in the book, which is banned in Russia, she found that it affected her like "a squall of rain and snow, like an avalanche, like a hurricane." Suffused with Pasternak's lan guage and imagery, she sat down and wrote an extraordinary 3,200-word document that she hoped would find its way back to her children and friends in Russia. Last week it appeared in the Atlantic magazine, which...
...whom I did not love") and the cold, mechanical commissar, and above all between herself and the doctor. "The Russia I have lost," she writes, "the Russia that has been taken from me by a cruel fate, as she was taken from Yuri Andreyevich Zhivago . . . wolves howl on your snow-covered plains, the land is still prey to folly and desolation, and there is no end to the rule of the Pharisees. I shall not see you again, I shall not see you for a long time, you have been taken away, abducted . . . but what am I saying? Who took...
Barthelme is a gifted anarchist in the world of words, and he offers no explanation of his purpose in Snow White. As in Alice in Wonderland, there are plenty of inner meanings and symbols to be found-social, psychological, existential, political. But the search for a point is simply not the point, even though midway through the book the author teasingly provides a questionnaire for grimly (or maybe Grimmly) determined readers. Sample yes-or-no question: "Has the work, for you, a metaphysical dimension? What is it (25 words or less...
Never mind the metaphysics. In exactly 20 words: No one who reads this jape will ever again feel quite comfortable reading the traditional Snow White to his children...