Word: swiftian
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Unhappily, Williams' story dies with his telling it, for though he weaves a spell he cannot validate a vision. It matters less that noisomely misanthropic symbols keep recurring in his work than that they nowhere seem purgative. With Swiftian ferocity he reveals a Swiftian tormented-ness; and as with Swift, however much he retches, he cannot disgorge.* More culpably, Williams' gift for theatricalism makes the how of Suddenly Last Summer devour the why, turns the horrifying means into an end in itself...
...some readers they have long been collector's items. In the bland climate of U.S. letters, true satire rarely flourishes, but the chilling ferocity of West's satirical attack would be rare anywhere. It involves not only a total rejection of common American ideals, but a Swiftian loathing for the texture of life itself. In his earliest work West recognized this of himself, in the character of a Cultured Fiend who says: "I was completely the mad poet. I was one of those 'great despisers' whom Nietzsche loved because 'they are the great adorers; they...
...take the reader of this chilling little volume a while to catch on to the fact that Author Duff is not really writing in praise of hanging. He has, in fact, produced a devastating Swiftian satire against capital punishment...
French Stories and Tales, ably edited by Stanley Geist, a young American critic and writer living in Paris, offers the richer literary experience. The selections range from a Stendhal love story, as intricate as a Japanese tea ceremony, to a fragment of Swiftian satire by Baudelaire on the suicide of a Parisian street urchin. In between, Balzac, Zola and Guy de Maupas sant lash at the favorite whipping boy of French letters, the French middle class. Best yarns in the book are stories of simple nobodies by Gustave Flaubert and Joris-Karl Huysmans...
...hyena-like laughter of scorn and triumph. But, more than a violent story, the film is a harsh study of universal drives stripped down to the core: lust, fear, selfishness, pride, hatred, vanity, cruelty. The woodcutter's version of the crime lays bare the meanness of man with Swiftian bitterness and contempt...