Word: tristram
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...included her totally in his vast intellectual life, fully revealed for the first time. Together they read an astonishing variety of books. Shakespeare was a leitmotif of their days. One Christmastide they slogged through Tristram Shandy, finishing it with "aversion." Turgenev, Kleist, Aristophanes, Plutarch, Xenophon, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Moliere, Balzac, Cervantes: the list runs on like the Rhine...
...reaper two millenniums before Cyrus McCormick. They cut roads through the forests, sometimes paved them with timber and stone and rumbled over them in carriages that had wheels rimmed with iron. Above all, the Celts were superb storytellers who bequeathed a literary legacy ranging from the Arthurian legend to Tristram and Isolde...
...Morte d'Arthur are eccentric. At times, he hovers close to the celebrated tale of King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table, chronicling their legendary exploits, the magical interventions of Merlin and the quest for the Holy Grail. But his treatment of the romances between Tristram and Isold, Launcelot and Guinevere reads like a medieval version of Couples. Querulous and selfabsorbed, the lovers are made to suffer the mutual incomprehension of male chauvinists and radical feminists. "Being a woman," the author says of Guinevere, "she could not understand honor and justice, for they were invented...
...like Richard, who takes love easy and regards sex as an urge that can be indulged without guilt or passion, seems only half alive. Love and life, in short, gain savor from a sense of sin and self-denial. The stricture against eating the apple and the sword in Tristram and Iseult's bed are both powerful sharpeners of appetite. This is not artistic news, though the observation is now unfashionable. That being so, whether Marry Me is part apologia or all fictional serrmonette, one of its points could well be dismissed as the higher hedonism in a nutshell...
...genre cannot be blamed. It holds an eminent position in literary history. In Samuel Richardson's Clarissa (1748), the villainous seducer, Lovelace, happened to be the Duke of Wharton. Robinson Crusoe was based on the desert-island experiences of one Alexander Selkirk off the coast of Chile, and Tristram Shandy caused not-always-comic shocks of recognition among the York neighbors of the puckish Laurence Sterne...