Word: twains
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...industry whatsoever and little agriculture to speak of unless mildew counted for something." But the discovery and enjoyment of such moments call for considerable patience. When the author's first novel, A Short History of a Small Place, appeared last year, reviewers guessed at such august influences as Twain and Faulkner. This time out, a case might be made for episodes of The Beverly Hillbillies. Pearson's parody of high-flown, old- fashioned Southern yarn spinning sounds a little too much like the minister presiding at the funeral of Jeeter, "who had a way with words if sheer bulk...
...know about me without your having read a book by the name of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but that ain't no matter. A lot of school- taught folks been talkin' about that story since Mark Twain made it up, about me and Jim floatin' on our raft down that monstrous big river, and Jim escapin' from slavery and me hiding him out. They say I did a big heroic thing in helpin' Jim get free, but that weren't it. Truth is, Jim helped me git free, 'cause if he hadn't made me realize that...
...erudition (Marlowe has atrocious taste in socks but can quote Browning). Touches of class cater to the tough-guy fantasies of the literati. Albert Camus, whose spare existential novels were influenced by U.S. detective fiction, looked like Humphrey Bogart portraying Sam Spade. Hemingway followed in the footsteps of Mark Twain and Ring Lardner. But it is hard to read such terse narratives as The Killers and To Have and Have Not without imagining gumshoe tracks leading back to Black Mask magazine...
Cavell said that while people often find it "too hard to believe in the seriousness of the enjoyable," the contribution of such American melodramas to world cinema is actually as great as the contribution of Mark Twain and Ralph Waldo Emerson to world literature...
Writing about India poses, of course, a similar dilemma. Those aspiring to something beyond costumes and pageantry must try to portray the native inhabitants from within, as they think and feel, to disprove Kipling's saw about the twain never meeting. This task is not only difficult but potentially self-defeating, since the allure of India to many Western eyes lies in the exotic ineffability of its people and spectacles...