Word: visional
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...keenly aware of Japan's historical heritage: "The houses were built in the style of the old regime. No doubt they were there when provincial lords passed down this north-country road." History, sensuality and the land -all interweave to suggest rather than state the uniqueness of his vision...
Meanwhile, Sisson's secretary, who quit her previous boss for continually "touching" her, incites Sisson into making groping passes. As the sexual tension increases, Sisson suffers double vision and temporary blind spells and takes to blindfolding himself with his secretary's scarf. At an office tea party, Sisson's wife and secretary delightedly lie down on Sisson's desk while the brother touches them with gentle intimacy. The unseeing Sisson stiffens catatonically in his chair and may just possibly be in his death throes...
...surface is never the substance in Pinter. The plot is merely a presentment of an inner state of being, a translation from the unconscious. In The Party, Pinter is governed once again by his vision of woman as the sexual aggressor. The secretary is pallidly but visibly related to the praying-mantis wife in The Homecoming. The character of Sisson was almost perfectly described by Cyril Connolly in The Unquiet Grave when he wrote: "A puritan is incomplete because he excludes that half of himself of which he is afraid, and so the deeper he imprisons himself in his fastidiousness...
...such comic relief is overwhelmed by the savage purity of Kosinski's vision -that of a man stripped of all humane conventions and in complete control of his impulses and appetites. In fact, the protagonist's obsession with control becomes indistinguishable from the book itself. Every word is weighted to produce the precise tension that each episode calls for. The effect is hypnotic but short-lived. For unlike The Painted Bird, this novel lacks the grounding situation, the structure and the connective tissue that could have made it more than a rather abstract expression of a pathological state...
...Karnilova's career (which includes performances varied as a stripper in Gypsy and Tevye's wife in Fiddler on the Roof) that we see enough of her to leave the theatre satisfied. As Hortense, the French lady on the hill who lets Zorba share her bed, she becomes a vision of lonely fortitude in the face of life's injustice. In one scene, during a song that tells of the "pretty admirals" who kept company with her in the distant past, she breaks into a dance she says she did when she worked as a cabaret star. Stepping gingerly then...