Word: sours
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...Room at the Top (TIME, May 27, 1957), British Novelist John Braine dealt with the reek of ill-gained success as experienced by a bounder inwardly appalled by his own amorality. In his second novel, Braine deals with the opposite, savors the sour scent of failure as lived by a welfare-state weakling. When the book opens, Dick Corvey, the novel's nonhero, is in a tuberculosis hospital. Behind him lie an army stretch marked by cowardice and a childhood marred by rich but weird imagination. He had peopled a sinister world in which the evil Vodi...
...mingle with any real people. Instead, there were constant spectacles in the 90° heat of midday, with giggling maidens flinging hibiscus and frangipani petals on the sweating Nikita; there were gargantuan meals, with endless courses of Indonesian and Dutch delicacies (to which Khrushchev always brought his own sour black bread), and nights filled with the tinkling music of gamelan orchestras...
...these stories, written between 1927 and 1948, the author goes about his business with sour skill, and with one or two lapses in which symbolism becomes ludicrous. Typical of the collection is a story about a young man, neither bad nor good but bored and alone, who meets two sisters, both whores, in a bar. The older sister balks at taking the young man back to her home ("Home is a sacred place," she says) and agrees only after a promise of additional lire. But during the tram ride to their destination, the younger girl chatters bawdily about her trade...
Endless Walkathon. Would-be philanthropic heavens too often become pluperfect hells. Just into his teens, the hero in The Good Light still has partial vision, but the first thing that assails him at the Blind Institute is the smell - paint, sour beer, and wet floor mops. The food is stale bread, dry cheese and gruel that the sightless inmates wolf down like animals. When the boy says good morning to his schoolmates, no one turns a head. He has entered a world in which nothing exists until it is touched...
Myth & Vinegar. Dr. Jarvis prescribes vinegar (always the apple-cider variety) for all comers. The vinegar can be taken straight or diluted in water. But for maximum efficacy, he insists that it be mixed with honey-a sort of sweet-'n'-sour, yang-and-yin combination...