Word: telemachus
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...book, Bonaparte, on his way to prison, Finds His Father and Recognizes Him--as every Irish hero since Telemachus and Daedalus has done. O'Coonassa has no trouble; he recognizes his father by his poverty, his fate (he is leaving the prison) and his name-Jams O'Donnell. But The Poor Mouth is as much pretence as plaint. In Gaelic putting on the poor mouth means complaining (according to the dictionary) and feigning suffering to get the advantage in a deal. O'Nolan's humour is as elusive and many-faceted as his name, but The Poor Mouth hides...
...earlier volume, Exiles, Arlen was a prep school Telemachus, searching for the truth about his late parent, author of The Green Hat and other best-selling novels of the '20s, who had succumbed to writer's block, deprecation and obscurity. In that poignant volume the son could only compile small sorrows and acts of redemption. However acute, Exiles was the work of a miniaturist. In Passage to Ararat, Arlen set himself a near-Homeric task: the recovery of a forgotten people. To accomplish that mission he has performed a series of brilliancies: his research is irreproachable...
While Eagleton and the three Congressmen have championed the cause, the pressure has been generated by a complex of Greek-American organizations. Most effective has been the American Hellenic Institute, founded last summer. The institute has a full-time lobbyist in Washington and is headed by Eugene Telemachus Rossides, a former Nixon-appointed Treasury Department official and a well-connected Republican attorney (he is a law partner of former Secretary of State William Rogers). Son of a Greek mother and Greek-Cypriot father, Rossides argues that the Cyprus crisis "exposed the myth of Kissinger's competence as a negotiator...
Without waiting for an answer, he and his fellow conspirators proceed to annihilate a classic. The epic adventures are turned into a few friezes reminiscent of a sixth grade pageant: Polyphemus, the Cyclops, bears a strong resemblance to a Sesame Street Muppet; Telemachus (Russ Thacker) might have escaped from a G-rated Disney film. The celebrated dancing and fighting is reduced to a series of galvanic gestures and deafening groans. The groans may be distinguished from the songs easily: the songs have words. Those lyrics, which act upon the mind like nepenthe, are also by Segal, a classics scholar...