Word: sodden
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Adams is absolutely first-rate at making the reader feel the river mist on his face, feel the brush of wet leaves across the skin of arms and thighs, or smell the stench of a sodden bear. This extraordinary ability to evoke physical detail carries the book to whatever success it has. Where the author seems weak is in the sentimentality of his conceptions. These shape what is not meant to be a children's tale into a kind of pretentious adolescent bluff: a tragic chronicle of conquest, corruption and decline that dribbles off into happily-ever-after...
...Hergé. All 62 pages. Atlantic-Little, Brown. Paperback $1.95 each. No one should be put off by Tintin himself, a boy in knickers with a muffin face and a tuft of hair rising to a curled peak like a Hokusai wave. Or by Captain Haddock, his bearded rum-sodden sidekick. Or by the small white dog, known as Milou in the original French versions of these stories, but for some inexplicable reason called Snowy in English...
...American Inquisition is written with all the attention to style and accuracy of a political flyer. The prose is so sodden with self-righteousness and heavy irony that only the faithful (i.e., "heretics") might hope to find it tolerable. And Belfrage has also retained that annoying C.P. habit of stating a half-truth as gospel and then scampering off to make a different point. He notes that no one accused of espionage by Elizabeth Bentley, Louis Budenz or Whitaker Chambers "was ever convicted of spying," without bothering to add that the statue of limitation for espionage protected most...
Rhinoceros, intact, is a scathing fairy tale, a parable about how everyone in a large town turns into a rampaging herd of large, loud, one-horned beasts. The lone holdout is a slightly sodden dreamer called Stanley (Gene Wilder), who regrets his inability to metamorphose, but who finally comes to realize the tenuous value of individuality. Stanley is a reluctant combatant and the winner of a dubious victory. His final assertion ("I'm the last man left, and I'm staying that way until the end") is as much an assertion of uncertainty as defiance, a bolster...
London even shed its sodden skies, and the burnished brass and gold leaf of the cavalry and coaches sparkled in the autumn sunshine. About the only sour note was sounded over the commemorative poem written by Sir John Betjeman; it was his first official literary effort since being named Britain's poet laureat. One Labor M.P. described the lyric as "turgid, unromantic and stamped with mediocrity," and called for Betjeman's resignation. The verse...