Word: stendhal
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...second novel, The Romantic Movement (Picador USA; 326 pages; $23), the unforgivably young and unforgivably knowing writer, now 25, gives us more of the same, presenting himself as a Stendhal of the '90s dating scene. Alice works in an ad agency, Eric in commodities. They meet at a ball, go to trendy London restaurants, take a holiday in Barbados; gradually, obligingly, they settle into their roles like glossy-magazine archetypes in a masque. He's a self-contained realist, she a self-doubting romantic. He won't talk and she won't stop. Their ups and downs are delicately choreographed...
...Havel's mind, brutality, stupidity and kitsch all belonged to the same local gang: dead-drunk communists and evil smells, ghastly heavy velvet drapes and torture. Havel's formula was a variation on Stendhal's rule: "Bad taste leads to crimes...