Word: tales
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...sexual initiation, his quest and so on. Barth himself protests that such similarity was quite unconscious, but once alerted, he set out to make good use of it. Written with the same complexity of plot and wild comedy that filled The Sot-Weed Factor. Giles Goat-Boy is the tale of George Giles, Everyhero, the offspring of a virgin and a computer, who sets out to save the world in a quest that recalls Jesus, Moses, Oedipus and Buddha, to name...
Tonight the Plaza is showing two by Truffaut The Wild Child, one of the best, an unsentimental detailed and narratively pure chronicle of Dr. Itard's attempts to tram a wolf child for human society in Enlightenment France, and The Bride Wore Black, one of his least, a stale tale of vengeance dedicated to Hitchcock Friday. Red Desert, middle period Antomennui Sarris's phrase) with beautiful color is paired with Juliet of the Spirits Felinis unsuccessful attempt to do for a frustrated house wife what 8 1/2 did for a castrated male artist leading as well into the garish technique...
...fire-breathing Chimera, conqueror of the Amazons and generally a favorite of the gods. Barth renders Bellerophon's adventures into a dizzying situation comedy in which metaphors are homogenized and characters recede into their own stories and reappear so that the middle of one man's tale could be another's beginning or ending. Both "Perseid" and "Bellerophoniad" spin on little else than the axis of Barth's cleverness, and both wobble badly...
...Dunyazadiad" is a different story (within a story within a story) and a winged horse of a brighter color. In it Barth succeeds with clarity, succinctness and natural ease in creating a modern tale out of the oldest forms of storytelling. It is about Scheherazade's famous plight as told by her younger sister Dunyazade, who sat at the foot of the bed for 1,001 nights while the Shah made love to Scheherazade and was held spellbound by her stories. It may be recalled that before the Shah met "Sherry," as she is known in the bedchamber...
...implying that after the flood of words already published about the famous fabricated "autobiography" of Howard Hughes, only Clifford Irving, the famous fabricator, can tell the true story. To believe the confessions of Clifford Irving is a little like believing the confessions of Baron Munchausen; yet he tells his tale with a certain bravado. And one may satisfy a morbid interest by watching a man who could write his way into so much trouble (a prison sentence of 2½ years and debts of about $1 million) trying to write his way out again...