Word: tales
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...taken from a Chinese poem in which a lonely man in a watchtower looks out across a barbarous and a desolate land. But it is also the gate at which the sentinels of civilization have always stood guard and always died in the end. The scene of this modern tale of horror is Africa, where the Roman watch fell to the Vandals 1,500 years ago, and where today the British guard is falling to nationalism. Whatever its accuracy as an omen, By the North Gate is one of the year's most chilling novels. It is as free...
...morality tale told by French Novelist Simon is harsh and gloomy. The story of Montés' futile wanderings is told through the recollections of derisive and uncomprehending French villagers, resifted by the man who collected the gossip, and who was the gaunt man's only close acquaintance. Antoine Montés came to the savagely provincial winegrowing town to claim an inheritance, the narrator recalls, his memory distorted by a sense of tragedy lurking in his background. The newcomer's father was once a prosperous winegrower. His mother surprised her husband making love to a maid...
...telephone, with a fantasy girl who sheds her anonymity but cannot pierce his almost inhuman exterior. Initially, the telephonic association of the pair seems implausible because it is such an appalling coincidence. Yet as she herself emerges as the subject of her own fantasy, the elements of the tale fall tidily into place, leaving the cold sensation of hard and real characters existing only as shatterproof shells. Without evidence of conscious effort, Kulukundis has managed to sketch characters who develop as they interact with each other, not with the author's conception of them. And his fast and clean style...
Senator Dodd's "Stand Firm" policy against the Russians has reduced the mealy-mouthings of Fulbright to a "tale . . . full of sound and fury, signifying nothing...
...Method cowboys? Who knows what agonies the hairy-chested prima donnas of horse opera suffer as they give birth to their roles? The riding, shooting, even walking lessons they must take; the continual risk of shooting off a sideburn? But the western story is not merely a tale that is told by television, full of sound and fury, signifying little. It traces back to a fantastically colorful period of U.S. history, the era when there was "no law west of Kansas City, and west of Fort Scott no God." For an account of the past and the present...