Word: witness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...best and most original novels. The Engineer of Human Souls, like Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being (TIME, April 16), spins its story from the torn entrails of Central Europe. Yet what emerges is comedy-black, grimacing and explosively funny, as peculiarly Middle European as the despairing wit of Prague's own Franz Kafka. Skvorecky has mixed history with high unseriousness before-notably in The Bass Saxophone, about a Czech youth playing in a German dance band during the war-but his latest work is unquestionably his masterpiece of that modern specialty, the heartbreaking belly laugh...
Spark generously and cleverly shares her wit with her characters. When, at the press conference, a reporter draws an analogy between Harvey and job, Harvey retorts, "I am hardly in the position of Job. He was covered with boils, for one thing, which I am not." Talking of Job, Harvey reveals something of Spark's own intentions when he observes that "He not only argues the problem of suffering, he suffered the problem of argument. And that is incurable." Spark, cautioned by her own character, does not argue for her own moral position but directs all her energies...
...operate successfully in the even more daunting arena of national politics. She will have to convince men everywhere, and women as well, that she is equipped to do what only men have done before: run the nation. She will expose herself to relentless public scrutiny with little more than wit and common sense to shield...
...epigram than a meditation on a profound theme. The Book of Job has haunted writings as disparate as Mark Twain's novel The Mysterious Stranger, Robert Frost's verse drama A Masque of Reason and Archibald MacLeish's play J.B. It requires more than bursts of wit and flashes of illumination...
...strength of the book are Updike's wit, the warmth of his writing and his wonderful, if not quite magical eye for imagery. These qualities combine to make a pleasant but still not satisfactory slightly longer that the taste of its gifts...