Word: watership
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...male. You retrograde modern romance, back to Northrop Frye's original "love and adventure" formula, away from modern "lust and bloodlust." And you even leave out most of the "love," to concentrate on your heroes-intrepid rabbits surviving against all obstacles. Richard Adams wrote that fantasy and called it Watership Down: it won both British awards for children's fiction in 1972, and then came to roost in the best seller lists for well over a year. Among other hyperbolic comments was this one in The St, Louis Post-Dispatch: "Anyone who can read English should read this book...
Richard Adams is a small, white-haired, opinionated Englishman who's "on tour now and working hard at it." He enjoys telling the "actually very well known story" about the origins of Watership Down, how his children persuaded him to write down the tale, how publisher after publisher rejected it because it was too long and intricate to be children's literature. His eyes gleam, and it's impossible to interrupt him as he goes over the history of the two children's fiction awards (about this time his agent, a rather large woman, stops paying attention to the interview...
...Great Bear God help him. It seems certain that he is in for a spell of heavyweight reviewing, the kind of borborygmic reappraisal the critical community indulges in when it feels slightly ill and foolish after a gorge of overpraise. What was overpraised, of course, was Watership Down, a bunny epic greeted last year as if it were a cross between Moby-Dick and The Wind in the Willows. The excessive praise was a critical phenomenon that occurs every year or so when reviewers tire of the stinginess that honesty requires, and heap all of their withheld love on some...
...Centennial/ Michener (2 last week) 2-Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, le Carré (1) 3-The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, Meyer (3) 4-The Dogs of War, Forsyfh (4) 5-Jaws, Benchley (7) 6-The Pirate, Robbins (5) 7-Watership Down, Adams (6) 8-The War Between the Tates, Lurie (8) 9-The Rhinemann Exchange, Ludlum(10) 10-Something Happened, Heller
...Watership Down, Adams...