Word: spites
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Barclay, Steven Gordon Crist and Mark O'Donnell, have seized on a wellworn theme--the fraudulent underbelly of American life, symbolized by the special sham of Hollywood, attached it to a frankly derivative score and allowed their creative instincts free rein. Their product is far from disastrous--in spite of its flaws, Bicentennial Follies is almost consistently entertaining; but, not too surprisingly, it is hardly a dramatically unified whole...
...AGED Mme. Simenon lies dying in a hospital. Her son, the author, comes to her side, and discovers that in spite of his 70 years he doesn't understand her. In the week that passes before death arrives, he tries to penetrate to the "truth" of his mother and of their bond, to "solve" that cliched jigsaw puzzle of filial love. Sitting silently across from her, he tortures himself with questions: "Why did my mother distrust me?"; "Why did she marry my father?"; "What was her youth like?"; "What did she think when...
...emphasize that it is a "key" to solving the mystery of Mme. Simenon. By page 90 (the book is 91 pages), Simenon is ready to terminate his garbled investigation, now thoroughly redundant, and give us his solution. It seems, finally, that she "needs to be good", in spite and in face of the world, and this is the reason she acted as she did, this is the "truth" of her person. But this person, do we understand her yet? Simenon seems to have forgotten his own question...
After months of increasing tension and in spite of anguished pleas from five Arab chiefs of state, Algeria and Morocco last week were on the brink of war for control of the former Spanish Sahara. By week's end a sharp and bloody battalion-level battle near the oasis of Amgala (see map) had apparently ended in Morocco's favor. Reports from the scene were sketchy, but the Algerian press service spoke of "violent combat," while Moroccan officials, claiming victory, conceded "many dead...
Ferocious Volume. After reading several such displays of spite, one might ask why Simenon completed and published this exercise. Part of the book is an earnest, if unsuccessful, effort to find forgiveness in understanding. Henriette was the 13th of 13 children; her father lost what money he had when she was five. Simenon's father died young, and getting by was not easy. In his only long novel, Pedigree, Simenon has written about his childhood in Liège; Henriette appears as Elise, a hardworking, humorless, almost avaricious woman. She eventually remarried a man who had what she always...