Word: strains
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...procession of loosely-connected scenes, characters either mouth inanities or strain unsuccessfully to reach rhetorical heights. An inordinate amount of time is spent in the exchange of civilities, or more often, incivilities; there's one whole pointless sequence, for example, which has three students demanding coffee from their landlady, complaining of its quality and then dumping it out the window. Many of the supposedly humorous lines seem lifted from a late-night bull session in a freshman dormitory, such as this suspiciously misogynous pronouncement...
...Gandhi cannot save all lives. Even before his assassination, the hacking out of West and East Pakistan leads to appalling religious butchery. The strain on both new nations is nearly fa tal. Within months of its creation, Pak istan's checks are bouncing. Shaken by his awesome difficulties, Nehru asks Mountbatten to take secret control of the country once again. The irony is crushing: the last English viceroy also has to serve as India's closet king...
JAMES THURBER used to call his New Yorker office on his day off, asking for Mr. Thurber. He would say he was greatly relieved to discover that Thurber was not in, and that therefore he must be where he thought he was. This schizoid strain runs through A Thurber Carnival, a set of Thurber skits and short stories currently in production...
Gaddis' prose occasionally shows strain...
...individuals but as qualities. She likes the poetic reverberations of lions, for example: a "pride" of lions; the lion thrown to slaughter in Daniel's den, Daniel representing men; the lion representing an alternate male predicament. Her men throw fleeting shadows over these poems, usually their last lines, which strain for harmony. Her primary subject is Giovanni, fawningly courting invisible men or haunting strong women who are being broken incessantly down to death. If you counted the verse where the first person hasn't slithered in, you'd probably tick off the few pleasing poems. It's sort of sentimental...