Word: stacton
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Signal Victory, by David Stacton. A hard, glittering, epigrammatic account of the Spanish rape of the Mayan civilization, marred by a central character who just misses coming to life...
...Signal Victory, by David Stacton. A hard, glittering, epigrammatic account of the Spanish rape of the Mayan civilization, marred by a central character who just misses coming to life...
...David Stacton's sourly excellent historical novels are like chess games of long-dead masters, replayed from dusty notes. The author moves the pieces for both black and white, knowing the outcomes, musing on strengths and weaknesses unseen by the players. It is to catalyze these dark musings, not to commemorate the players, that Stacton restages the old battles. Not surprisingly, his novels lack the painted scenery and speeches in all-purpose King James dialect that clutter other historical fiction. In A Signal Victory, the ironically titled tale of the Spanish conquest of the Maya civilization, there...
...following Stacton's tortuous meditations has its rare rewards. Without 400 pages of cutlass work, the invading Spanish are contemptuously summed up: "They knew nothing of navigation. That they left to the Portuguese. When there was something to shoot, they shot it. When there was nothing to shoot, they prayed." The author admires the doomed Mayas, the soft, proud, cruel, devious fanciers of blood sacrifices. It is a measure of his skill that he persuades the reader to admire them...
...figure from history, a Spanish renegade named Guerrero, who tried to shake the Maya princes from their fatalism and organize resistance to the invaders. The enigma of Guerrero is not fully resolved at the book's end; he is a less complete character than that other Stacton enigma, the Pharaoh Ikhnaton of the brilliant On a Balcony (TIME, Sept. 6. 1959). The trouble may be that philosophical novelists are, in their weakest moments, tract-writing zealots. Stacton's message in this book is that the proper study of doomed men is how to die with dignity...