Word: tales
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...strain of finding a common bond between Erica Jong and Elizabeth Barrett Browning forces Moers into some ingenious critical parlor games. Setting the tone in her opening chapter, ("My tale is one of triumph"), Moers presents a cloying portrait of George Sand as a scribbling SuperMom-prototype of the "efficient, versatile, overworked modern mother." The need to establish distinctly female traditions also leads to unabashed juggling of literary records. It makes no sense for a critic who has written intelligently about Thackeray and Dickens in previous books to claim that illiteracy is "plainly a woman's theme" or that...
Patty's whole tale, the prosecutor said, was "just too big a pill to swallow." He asked the jurors if they would accept the "incredible story" of the robbery "from anyone but Patricia Hearst. If you wouldn't, don't accept it from her either." Browning concluded with a quote cited in several Supreme Court decisions that had a grim, Old Testament ring. He hoped, he said, "that guilt shall not escape or innocence suffer...
...Brothers (1960), he described the brutalizing of a farm family moving north to Milan. Visconti's later works tended toward operatic melodrama (The Damned) or slick, vacant, surface beauty (Death in Venice). Conversation Piece, badly received at the New York Film Festival last fall, told the seemingly autobiographical tale of an elderly man of taste and learning trying to embrace the wasted lives of the barbaric sybarites around...
...proffers a hero entirely antithetical to Sebastian Dangerfield. Balthazar ("possession of treasure") is sincere, decent, loving and wealthy. Yet he is plagued by the same consuming unhappiness as Dangerfield. The tone of the whole book, in fact, is unlike that of The Ginger Man: Balthazar B is a wistful tale, and though lightened by brilliant flashes of humor, it always maintains an essentially sorrowful vision of life. Written in the traditional mode of bildungsroman, a story of youthful education, it is nevertheless not a picaresque rogue story. Rather, Balthazar B resembles in theme the modern novel of disenchantment and alienation...
UNDERNEATH THIS aura of impressive, slightly clumsy knowledgeability about banks and bankers, the Moneychangers is quite a simple moral tale. Its characters are for the most part either good or bad, so it is easy to tell, by observing what they do and think, where Hailey's sympathies lie--and if these associations alone don't sketch out an ideology, the action of the novel certainly does. Alex Vandervoort, the hero, is liberal; he lives with an intelligent woman lawyer, tries to have the bank help people in the ghetto, and is scrupulously honest. The villain, Roscoe Heyward, fluctuates wildly...