Word: spoilt
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...style; Burgess, for all the richness of his repertoire, writes in a monotone that is no more varied than his fixed point of view. Cleverness ("She breathed on him (though a young lady should not eat, because of the known redolence of onions, onions) onions."), hyperbole ("his insides, like spoilt cats demanding milk as lava begins to engulf the town and the cats with it, complained and switched on a kind of small avant garde chamber piece for muted brass") and poetry ("Out in the gull-clawed air, New Year blue, the tide crawling creamily in, Enderby felt better.") become...
...Glorious Spoilt Children. This third novel by Sylvia Ashton-Warner, the greatly gifted New Zealand teacher and writer, displays all the qualities of style, feeling and subject matter that made her earlier books (Spinster, Incense to Idols, and the autobiographical Teacher) unforgettable. Except that this time she has pushed these qualities to an unbearable extreme, to create what is finally a fascinating and disturbing book, but a failure...
...figure of Bell Call is Tarl, who is obsessed by her belief in total freedom for herself and her four children. Author Ashton-Warner has written urgently before this about the necessity of freedom in the education of young minds. "How glorious," she wrote in Teacher, "are the dirty spoilt children, never held up with fear!" But Tarl carries the idea beyond conviction to monomaniacal compulsion. "Her voice is soft with faith. Tomorrow we'll be with nature where there's no one at all In Charge. Freedom...
...fact, facing up to the finality of death is a liberation; it makes life itself more precious: "The idea that death is not absolute consoles the childish individual, but prevents society from being adult. If it were proved that there is an afterlife, life would be irretrievably spoilt. It would be pointless; and suicide, a virtue...
...those"-before she flew off to Manhattan. And three days later he popped the question during a $168 phone call "via Telstar." Smiled the smitten bridegroom-to-be: "I've only known her for a few weeks, but I don't think that matters. She is un spoilt and also very dishy...