Word: travenous
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When a skinny, secretive old man who called himself "Hal Groves" died in Mexico eight years ago, one' of literature's strangest paper chases came to an end. Services were held not for Groves but for "Traven Torsvan," a naturalized Mexican citizen. The dead man's widow acknowledged what had been widely suspected: that Torsvan, who had hidden his identity for 45 years, was indeed the reclusive novelist B. Traven. The author's broody, metallic style echoes that of Stephen Crane and Joseph Conrad. His once acclaimed books and short-story collections (The Treasure...
...posthumous identification soon led to other puzzles. Why, if he had been raised in the U.S. (as Torsvan hinted), was his written English so Germanic? Was Torsvan-Croves-Traven also, as rumored, a German-American anarchist and pamphleteer named Ret Marut, last seen under that name in Munich in 1919, facing a sentence of death...
...first novel, manages to trap the solar energy of his landscape; the shadowy Indian existence is thrown against the brilliant screen of another reality that hovers, shimmers and then vanishes the way it came. Claremon is a bit of a necromancer himself, easily summoning up the spirits of B. Traven, Garcia Lorca and-unhappily -Ernest Hemingway. It is in echoing Papa's Spanish style that the novelist makes his largest error. For to use "for" on almost every page is to bring a monotony to a highly charged work. For an author does not render Mexican into English that...
Pynchon the man remains as mysterious and private as always. Even the critical acclaim for V. could not get him to reveal himself to the public. As publicity shy as J.D. Salinger, as shadowy as B. Traven, Pynchon, who is now 35, does not grant interviews and will not allow himself to be photographed. Those who knew him at Cornell in the mid-1950s recall a tall, thin man who breakfasted on spaghetti and soda pop, maintained an above-90 average in the physics department and was very self-critical where his creative writing was concerned...
Treasure of the Sierra Madre. John Huston's finest, most vivid film portrays three bums propsecting for gold in Mexico. Based on a novel by a mysterious Mexican author, B. Traven, the story is an adventure weaved so tightly it becomes allegory. But such a description hides the style of the film. Its portraiture, not just of characters but of Tampico and the bum's life, is as skillful as could be, and the mood ranges from harsh humiliation of Bogart by Alfonso Bedoya, the bandit chief, to dreamy paradise that Walter Huston finds...