Word: tartaric
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...TARTAR STEPPE (214 pp.)-D/no Buzzafi-Farrar, Straus & Young...
...have lurked in the background of many contemporary novels. But Italy's Dino Buzzati, best known in the U.S. for his children's story, The Bears' Famous Invasion in Sicily, is one of the few who have come close to rewriting a whole Kafka parable. The Tartar Steppe follows the style, mood and architecture of Kafka's Castle, the story of man struggling hopelessly to enter a stronghold in whose depths, could he but fathom them, lay faith and stability. The difference is that Buzzati's hero struggles from within the stronghold itself...
Food was the most frequent cause of revolt in those days, however. Commons fare was austere, and the diners hardly got an egg in their beer. As a matter of fact, one morning they even had a tartar emetic in their coffee, thanks to the famous efforts of two chem students...
...Harvard Hall reconverted to its old peacetime uses, but another revolution soon began, known as the "Rotten Cabbage Rebellion," between the students and the food they were being served. Among other incidents, this conflict once found 600 grains of tartar emetic applied to the College's morning coffee (with disastrous results), and a students suspended after he "did publickly in Hall insult the authority of the College by hitting one of the Officers with a potatoe." By 1816 the expanding collection of books and apparatus squeezed out the Commons to the newly-erected University Hall, and the whole second floor...
Fiction & Fact. Three years later, Richard asked for a divorce to marry Nancy. Mrs. Randolph prescribed for him a fatal dose of tartar emetic instead, and Nancy was kept at her menial work. She was a lot better off the day the self-widowed Mrs. Randolph tired of torturing her and chased her out of the house to earn her own living. Nancy did better than that: she went North, met courtly, wealthy old Gouverneur Morris, and married him-fictionally and in fact...