Word: vitas
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...great modern directors of the cinema, Antonioni and Resnais, collaborate on their first film, declaring that it will "try to capture the langorous, subtle rhythyms of the vita vrai." While viewing it a student declares that "if someone isn't killed within thirty minutes I'm getting out of here." No one is, he does...
...middleaged, Mineola, L.I., novelist packs himself, his wife and his three children off to the dolce vita country in hopes of discovering the enriched goodness that graced the prose-and-life styles of Zola and Dostoevsky, apparently because they never had to attend the P.T.A. The wife is soon marking time with an Italian movie director, and the writer dillydallies with a local marchesa who wickedly dots her toes with perfume. At the moment of carnal truth, husband flashes his children's photographs like an FBI agent making an arrest, and leaves, virtus intacta...
...longa, vita brevis to the contrary, most "immortal" paintings are all too perishable. Oil paintings in particular suffer from uneven temperatures, direct sunlight, or smog. Some of the finest works of Rembrandt, a meticulous craftsman, have darkened and yellowed after three centuries; several Van Gogh canvases are in danger of disintegration after only 75 or 80 years. As for abstract expressionist paintings, which are characteristically encrusted with heavy, hastily applied impastos-often by artists who are relatively untutored in the complexities of oil technique-museums find that they should be periodically turned upside down so that errant paint will ooze...
This novel of decay, disillusion and a spurious dolce vita attracted a wide audience of Italian readers, and won the Strega literary prize in 1961. The nominal heroine is a girl with a blonde ponytail, a little boy's face and a woman's body, who exists as a fixation of love in the narrator's past; the real heroine, however, is the blowzy city of Naples, which either "mortally wounds you or puts you to sleep." The dialogue (in better-than-average translation) has a crisp, contemporary cadence, and the writing can be perceptive and well...
...where the press has tried to appraise Johnson, the treatment has generally been superficial and routine. "Johnson is not an intellectual nor a philosopher nor an innovator," said Vita magazine in a cover story on the President. But then Vita paid Johnson a grudging compliment: "He has, however, an unequaled capacity and ability to resolve, one at a time, the little problems of daily life...