Word: vriesian
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...serious side of De Vries has been subject to considerable analysis, most of it attempts to align the author's dour Dutch Calvinist upbringing with his development as a comic writer. To borrow a De Vriesian analogy, such treatment is like putting the reader into a diving bell and taking him down 3 ft. His latest novel counters that effect by granting his fans a chance to wet their feet once again in the forbidding shallows of sex, money and social class...
Consenting Adults, or the Duchess Will Be Furious is another De Vriesian tumble down that rabbit hole where love and lechery are humorously blurred with a yearning for the Absolute. In short, the novel is a romantic and philosophical farce, a form of entertainment that the author has owned since the publication of such fetching titles as No but I Saw the Movie, Into Your Tent I'll Creep, The Tunnel of Love and Comfort Me with Apples...
...humor of Open Heart runs less to slapstick (perhaps because Bebb already has done most of his turns) and more to De Vriesian one-liners: "I knew that I had to get away that day-their fresh-faced guilt was too great a reproach to my shifty-eyed innocence." Antonio, the narrator of both novels, is five years older in the new one, and he has coalesced to the point where sometimes it is possible to get a look at him. He travels west, returns home, encounters an acquaintance of Bebb who just may be a demon. He accepts cuckoldry...
...masterpiece, The Blood of the Lamb, his literary charades more or less cheerfully present a more or less repetitive series of matrimonial alarums and excursions. The De Vries wife-customarily strong, indulgent, humorless but invaluable -acts as a combined anchor and honeypot for the engaging, mercurial, hopelessly lightweight De Vriesian husband, who mostly can't pun his way out of a wet paper bag but is willing to die trying...
| 1 |