Word: tedium
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...ultimate in barbiturate prose is the point at which tedium becomes coma, and perennially bestselling Author Keyes may have reached this point in The Chess Players. Her great sedative skill can be appreciated only when it is understood that her material, as such, is fascinating. The novel is set in New Orleans and Paris in the 1850s and '60s, contains an amorous princess, various spies and diplomats, a slave auctioneer, lovely Creole maidens, and splendidly uniformed military personnel. The hero is a brilliant, brooding fellow who becomes the world chess champion and then chucks it all for love...
...Miracle, in time of war no patrician matron of Imperial Rome could have been more intransigent, bellicose and stoic. Despite invincible fear of air travel, she flew with Duff in countless trips to zones of war, sometimes "hard-arse" (Lady Diana's phrase). She endured inconceivable official tedium, the horrors of the Indian "lu."† saw a second English generation of her class face death (on Dday, "two Mannerses"), and for a time, in "dung-covered boots," fed swill to pigs on a Sussex farm. Her bits on the horrors of life under British austerity are done with sharp...
...through an unavenged adultery a generation back; Auntie lies year long in a whisky fog with a loaded revolver at her bedside; her one friend is a boozy Cambridge expatriate who must, for his own reasons, falsify what "home" is like. Society at the local dorp is of inconceivable tedium, and only the natives in their kraals suggest that life lived on its own terms may be a good thing. When Daphne finally escapes to her never-never land, Author Spark moves to her fictional kill like a Mau Mau houseboy...
...wait for sunrise, all conscripted From our passions by the tedium...
...through his career with airy speed, Sanders tells how he might have become a matinee idol if he had not been too bored to keep a crucial lunch date with Louis B. Mayer, how he was signed to replace Ezio Pinza in South Pacific but could not face the tedium of nightly performances on Broadway. "During the five years I was married to Zsa Zsa Gabor," he confides, "I lived in her sumptuous Bel Air mansion as a sort of paying guest." Communicating with Zsa Zsa was never easy, since she seemed to do almost everything under a hair dryer...