Word: squalore
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Begging for the Scraps. For all the squalor, few slum dwellers would return to the farm. Back home in Chile's Andean highlands Alberto Paredes, 26. earned 25? a day working on a hacienda "with only the wind and the animals." Today in Santiago he makes $1.50 a day as a construction helper. "Here I have a radio," says Paredes. A Peruvian mountain couple, German and Aurelia Ortega, are stuck in El Monton (The Pile), a Lima slum of 5,000 people beside a garbage dump. With 14 relatives, they huddle in a dirt-floored hut-its walls made...
...Kirkland production succeeds in capturing the humor, the squalor, the tragedy, and the eeriness of the play. The show starts slowly, but by the second act it is really rolling, and the climactic scenes in the church at Buck Creek and on the mountain peak are powerful theatre...
...avoid soap and water, live in dingy tenements or, weather permitting, take to the road as holy hoboes, pilgrims to nowhere. Most of them adore Negroes, junkies, jazzmen and Zen. The more extreme profess to smoke pot, eat peyote, sniff heroin, practice perversion. They are, in short, bohemians; the squalor of their lives is reflected in their verse...
...different order out of it is intensely difficult for the week-stomached, it is impossible. Characters and scenes float in and out of the with a wonderfully picaresque irregularity of Rabelaisian humor are broken off unexpectedly by passages approaching the drunken, frenzied poetry of a Rimbaud. Obscurity and philosophy, squalor and rhapsody are juxtaposed, crammed together, torn apart and tossed wildly, as if the book were the mixing bowl in which Miller, the mad chef, were preparing a salad -- to fling in the face of the diners. But not even in obscenity or nihilistic frenzy do we find...
...destructiveness in Tropic, but Miller manages to avoid the tediousness and peevishness which gives so much of modern literature an unsavory reputation. The wealth of his language is immense, and beneath it, one hears a tone of voice that is much too positive to ever lose itself in the squalor and pain it deals with. Miller would destroy modern culture, yes; but he is in control of the destruction, and not vice versa. The images of cancer, of decay, that run through the book convey the point very well. The world is falling apart, getting even worse than ever...