Word: stacton
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...Signal Victory, by David Stacton. A cool, clear fictional account of the Mayan civilization's collapse before the Spanish conquest...
...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...
...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...