Word: soups
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...this is amiably flavorsome matzo-ball soup opera. Gertrude Berg is flawless in her comic timing, wry-arch in gesticulation, a singsong bird of prey who pounces on the feeblest line for a resounding laugh. For wit, there are Jewish folk inflections; for character, stereotypes; for comic insight, racial in-group jokes. Following up on his 1959 hit, A Majority of One, Spigelgass proves that he can bring in greenback gushers without any risky drilling for dramatic art. He is a situation tinker, and his vocation is to be not a playwright but a millionaire...
...year at the Philadelphia Museum College of Art. There, he had "tried the abstract thing for a while, but I always had to get back to people." Today, when he thinks of the new craze for pop art, he becomes "furious. When an artist paints a Campbell's Soup can, he may be saying something valid, but he cuts himself out as an artist. He is no better than the can." Goodman's own idols have always been Velasquez, Vermeer, Goya-and Rembrandt: "He paints a head and it looks right through...
...haunted by visions of people he has cheated in his life. At times they sprawl all over his room, tormenting him so much he spills his soup and screams in agony. In the afternoon, when he is feeling almost amiable, he tosses some bread crumbs to a sickly pigeon. He runs out of crumbs, but the pigeon continues to stare at him with a baleful red eye. ''If I look at it long enough it will go away,'' the old man thinks. The pigeon pecks at his shoe. "Go away," the old man cries, kicking...
...ceilings were always coated with frost. Every day the prisoners were sent out to do senseless, back-breaking labor. Meals were always the same watery gruel with chunks of rotten fish (Shukhov was jeered because he refused to eat fish eyes when they were floating free in the soup). The guards made the prisoners undress outside to be frisked, beat them with birch clubs, threw any who talked back into a barely heated "cell," where a ten-day sentence meant a probable case of tuberculosis and 15 days meant certain death...
...animal cunning for finding food and avoiding punishment. He knows when to press forward, when to hang back, whom to be near, whom to avoid. In a complex series of maneuvers, any one of which could land him in the cell, he wangles an extra bowl of soup, some tobacco, and-his triumph-a slice of sausage, which he exultantly swallows in bed: "the brief moment for which a prisoner lives." In a gruesome way, the novel has a happy ending, for Shukhov goes to sleep quite pleased with his day's adventures...