Word: wordplay
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...just-completed Senate race, however, put an unaccustomed strain on the Tunney reputation. His performance in a primary he narrowly won was often wooden, and he vacillated on issues. He was described by critics as a "lightweight"-an obvious wordplay reference to his boxer father, former Heavyweight Champion Gene Tunney...
Elsewhere West taps against his daughter's silence with exuberant wordplay. In a dazzling tour de force he compiles a looping, digressionary dictionary of her vocabulary, from "agnoo" (thank you) to "zwingh" (swing). He projects Mandy into the future as a kind of wholesome blonde Barbarella, zipping through time and space on exotic journeys. He creates worlds in which the handicapped seem to resemble Edward Lear's innocent creatures: compassionate Jumblies who set to sea in sieves and return, birds with corkscrew legs, who, like Mandy, are not rejects of nature but unique and puzzling variations of nature...
...same is true of Sagarana (U.S. edition: 1966), a cycle of stories in which Guimarāes Rosa's Joycean prose turns the folklore and rough-and-tumble of backwoods life into a fresh order of experience. Unfortunately, much of the wordplay, coinages, dialect and rhythms are lost in the passage from Portuguese to English...
...deep should well-amused readers poke beneath the jaunty black humor and Joycean wordplay? This remains a perennial Burgess puzzle. He is a composer and music critic, a one-time lecturer in phonetics, a learned, lapsed Catholic, and-not the least-a superb writer. Unlike Graham Greene, he does not separate his "serious" novels from his "entertainments." Rather, he tries to make them all two-for-one propositions...
...SHORTER FINNEGANS WAKE, by James Joyce, edited by Anthony Burgess. Novelist Burgess (A Clockwork Orange) has pulled Joyce's astronomical Dublin masterpiece into the general reader's field of vision simply by cutting out two-thirds of it. There is still plenty of wit and wordplay left...