Word: viscounts
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UNOFFICIAL HISTORY (242 pp.)-Field Marshal the Viscount Slim-David McKay...
DEFEAT INTO VICTORY (468 pp.)-Field Marshal the Viscount Slim-David McKay...
...Dead or the precise tapestry of Cornelius Ryan's The Longest Day, the historically important memoirs of Ike or Monty have all the vitality of quartermaster supply reports. One of the war's few Great Captains who can hold his own with the professional writers is Viscount William Slim, commander of Britain's "forgotten" Fourteenth Army in Burma...
...medieval romances, knights grow nobler from suffering. The Cloven Viscount, Medardo of Terralba, grows worse. He is cut cleanly in two from head to crotch by a Turkish cannon ball, and one half of him is saved by doctors. This half returns home with a maniacal urge to slice everything else in two: flowers, mushrooms, small animals. "If only I could halve every whole thing like this," the viscount philosophizes, "so that everyone would escape from his obtuse and ignorant wholeness. Beauty and knowledge and justice only exists in what has been cut to shreds...
Calvino's macabre heroes have the potential of powerful allegory, but Calvino weakens his stories by cluttering them with too many other symbolic characters, e.g., the good half of the viscount eventually shows up, and a pat ending is achieved when the two halves are rejoined. Still, there are passages almost worthy of Cervantes. A nun bemoans her sheltered life: "Apart from religious ceremonies, triduums, novenas, gardening, harvesting, vintaging, whippings, slavery, incest, fires, hangings, invasion, sacking, rape and pestilence, we have had no experience. What can a poor nun know of the world?" When two feudal armies clash...