Word: undertows
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...regarded as a somewhat slapdash executive himself. Devoted to his family (two children), Gonçalves relaxes by swimming at the deserted, rocky Guincho Beach on the Atlantic coast, where he owns a simple cottage. Gonçalves often chooses an area of giant waves and a powerful undertow; characteristically, he seems to welcome the danger...
...book never stands still for a moment. Story lines constantly interweave; historical figures become part of fictional events and fictional characters participate in real history. In ways both fantastic and poetically convincing, the members of a suburban upper-middle-class family combine and change in the undertow of events. As if Clarence Day had written Future Shock into Life with Father, Doctorow's images and improvisations foreshadow the 20th century's coming preoccupation with scandal, psychoanalysis, solipsism, race, technological power and megalomania...
...purchases his farm as a tax write-off, but it gradually grows on him -and on the reader. Soon the African earth and its plowman conspire to give the novel its center and its soul. The lyricism cannot last. Mehring cracks up principally because the author must punish the undertow of racism that tugs at all his small virtues. To bring about the denouement, Gordimer resorts to a trick best relegated to gothic potboilers: the corpse that will not stay put. The body of a black man, apparently murdered, appears on Mehring's land. He has it buried...
...heard of Penny, the more often I watched him deal with marathon phone calls; I began to share in his hypnosis. No longer was I just a listener, as Nick plunged deeper into some sort of blessed state. A fool possessed, perhaps, but I was getting caught in the undertow...
...glistening language that keeps the plays fresh; it is their powerful moral undertow. The characters may be caparisoned in quattrocento raiment, but they speak to eternal situations. When Othello says, "I am black/ And have not those soft parts of conversation/ That chamberers have," he escapes temporal boundaries and becomes the chorus of the ghetto. Similarly, Shylock cries, "... Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? ... if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?" The tone of the merchant's queries seems lifted not from ancient Venice but from some current Security Council dispute...