Word: vishnu
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...While Vishnu dreams, says the Hindu, the world is born. Private dreams are subcontracted out of this cosmic snooze with the understanding that when Vishnu wakens, all subordinate dreamers will be rubbed out like morning eyecrust...
Though disappointing, Anti-Memoirs is a remarkable cultural confection, especially for readers armed with some prior knowledge of Malraux and France, not to mention a tolerance for offhand allusions to everything from Vishnu to Vichy water. Its most accessible elements are brief recollections of personal danger, each spiced with the author's sense of fate and history. Such incidents were chosen because they brought Malraux, the man of action, face to face with death-and the limitations of human courage-just as his lifetime has brought him face to face with the limitations of the revolutionary aims that...
...tourist attraction. He has become an all-purpose critic in the U.S. and beyond, jousting with as many demons as a latter-day Vishnu, the many-armed Hindu god of a thousand names. To some, he is just an all-purpose bore. "The two necessities for 1968," says one detractor, "are the defeat of Lyndon Johnson and the massive putdown of John Kenneth Galbraith. It's difficult to see which would be the more difficult...
Part of his hold on Indonesia is mystical. In a land that believes fervently in spirits, sorcerers and prophets, he has become a genuine folk hero, identified in Java with a 14th century Prime Minister who built a great empire, and in Bali with Vishnu, the god of rain. Many of his countrymen believe that Sukarno is blessed with kesaktian, a supernatural magic power that protects him from evil and makes him superhuman. Palace servants used to sell bottles of his bath water to peasants, who hoped that by drinking it they would inherit some of his magic...
...tools, some dating to the 16th century, including yard-long shears. In the penthouse studio, the restorers ("Most important men here," says Rorimer) contemplate a Renaissance Piero di Cosimo for months before attempting to remedy a millimeter's flaking. In the dungeon basements, a crusty bronze Vishnu lies in a vat of alkali soaking nearly a year until cleanliness restores it to godliness...