Word: torpor
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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None of this is dazzlingly new; Kafka clearly is a grandfather of the movement, and Sartre and Camus are at least unacknowledged uncles. New Realism's most important idea is to show life scrubbed clean of theatricality, and in the novel's present period of torpor, the Paris insurrection cannot be ignored. Among the latest New Realism imports...
SHOCK THEATER-"The title tells all. Many of the viewers are children who follow the show in a state of fascination and torpor. What is the purpose of this thing, anyway-to make us wake up screaming...
With the appearance of Mountolive, sex and sadness recede before the powerful thrust of politics. Many of the riddles posed in the earlier books get new answers. Pursewarden kills himself not from spiritual torpor but in expiation of a political blunder. Justine's fevered racing from bed to bed is shown to be patriotism, not nymphomania, for she and Nessim are smuggling arms into Palestine. Nessim believes that only the creation of a strong Jewish state will save the isolated minorities of the Middle East-Copts, Greeks, Armenians, Jews-from "being gradually engulfed by the Arab tide...
...some readers, at least, Manuel the Mexican will be a memorable tour de force. Novelist Coccioli is able to evoke the "malicious torpor" of the bizarre Mexican scene more brilliantly than anyone since Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, which was the story of a man to whom drink was a religion. Coccioli succeeds in the more difficult story of a man intoxicated by God. His complicated moral seems to be that sanctity is inviolable, that revelation is continuous, that time present is time past, and that, whether or not Christ is also the Lord Tepozteco, it is unarguable...
First, he proved to be a relative rarity among high school art teachers-an able artist. Said one student: "We never had an art teacher who could really draw before." Next, he roused the slow learners in his math course from their vegetable torpor. His method: "I told them that they had to work hard because in order for me to feel a dignity in my work I had to accomplish something, and that something was to teach them math. I said I was very interested in not wasting my time. At first they didn't believe me. They...