Word: wits
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Kennedy Wit, Adler...
...early novels, which he wrote in Russian in the days when he was a member of the Czarist émigré community in Berlin and Paris. Several of these translations, notably 1963's version of The Gift (his last Russian novel), have displayed the unmistakable Nabokov wit and sardonic inventiveness. The Defense is the earliest of his work yet to be reissued, and reading Nabokov of the '20s is like looking at a childhood snapshot of an old friend: the features are uncomfortably unformed, the resemblances often disappointing...
...work of Argentina's Ricardo Alventosa, 33, is a wicked little misanthropic comedy that develops as a spectacular succession of sight gags. The plot is taken from Maupassant's tale of a legacy and the absurd or appalling things three people do to get it; the wit is dry, fast, subtle. When an impotent man looks at an obelisk, he winces. When a sour old spinster finally drops dead, her happy-go-lucky brother sidles up to the death bed, leans forward with a glitter of maniacal triumph in his eyes and deftly distorts her customary sneer into...
...acting tone of the evening with a performance of marmoreal monotony. Everyone labors strenuously over the point that Anouilh talkily belabors: to be robbed of the worst, or the best, past is not a theft but a gift. Anouilh further argues, without his later agile irony and cogent wit, that a man can indeed escape his past, which suggests that the young playwright still harbored at least one fond and vastly foolish illusion...
Some painful, intimate truths are far easier to confess to a chance friend opportunely met than to the closest member of the family. A couple of drinks, a quiet dinner, brandy and cigars before the inn fire-and imperceptibly, from behind the urbanity and wit emerge the true facts of a marriage in shambles or of a mortal sickness. This is exactly the kind of book that Milanese Journalist Luigi Barzini has written to explain to the U.S. the delights and secret deficiencies of his countrymen's manners and morals...