Search Details

Word: tarden (lookup in dictionary) (lookup stats)
Dates: during 1975-1975
Sort By: most recent first (reverse)


Usage:

...Tarden isn't always the perpetrator of Cockpit's atrocities. Sometimes, as in Steps, he is only a witness; occasionally he is the victim. Once in a while, in his apparently motiveless interference in people's lives, he does them a good turn. In the process, we don't learn very much about him. He has an apparently limitless amount of money, and an extraordinary intelligence for survival (he boasts of this). He describes some of his past in a sketchy and idealized way: he managed by cunning to escape from a totalitarian, evidently EasternEuropean state; in the United States...

Author: By James Gleick, | Title: A New Jerzy | 9/19/1975 | See Source »

...diminish the impersonality of Kosinski's narrative technique, Tarden says virtually nothing about how he feels, or about what sort of person he is. Once or twice he relates a view of him reflected in the perceptions of some third person, as when he eavesdrops on a mistress describing him to someone else; on those occasions it is as if a bit of recognizable reality has accidentally made its way into Tarden's nightmarish, monomaniacal descriptions of torture and death. There is no question but that Kosinski is a fiction writer of considerable craft, as well as imagination. These...

Author: By James Gleick, | Title: A New Jerzy | 9/19/1975 | See Source »

...WORLD of Cockpit is not only barren, it is random and irrational. Tarden's obsession with power is a way of fighting the absolute dominion of chance and accident, a way (he reverses Faulkner's phrase) of surviving where most people only know how to endure. Tarden blinds an armed attacker by luring him into a room used for treating photographic plates with powerful quartz lights. That man, he says, was a fool for taking so few precautions. Tarden, on the other hand, hooks his feet around the legs of chairs so they can't be pulled out from under...

Author: By James Gleick, | Title: A New Jerzy | 9/19/1975 | See Source »

...even Tarden cannot endure beyond the limits of chance and his own mortality. His tireless self-confidence finally shaken by a narrow escape from a broken elevator in one of his high-rise apartment buildings, he conjures up this final, barren image...

Author: By James Gleick, | Title: A New Jerzy | 9/19/1975 | See Source »

Sweating and vomiting, trapped by the weakness of his body, Tarden is still in the cockpit. The limitations of Tarden's religion of power, suggested before, are finally confirmed. All that's left, in this bitter novel, is an unredeemed sense of futility...

Author: By James Gleick, | Title: A New Jerzy | 9/19/1975 | See Source »

| 1 | 2 | 3 | Next