Word: moralistic
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Strong material, then; and Rezzori follows this family labyrinth back with a fine disdain for sentiment, a transparency of feeling, an acid sense of humor and a vigilant eye for nuances of love and indifference, language, landscape and class behavior. It is not a young man's (or a moralist's) book. But it is intensely moving and contains, in its winding and ironic cadences, not a slack sentence: a performance in a difficult key about the making of a near extinct kind of European...
...over freedom. It is the distinction, too often neglected, between censorship and censure (the free expression of moral disapproval). What the campuses are trying to do (at least those with state money) is use the force of government to contain freedom of speech. What Donald Wildmon, the free-lance moralist from Tupelo, Miss., does when he gets Pepsi to cancel its Madonna ad is censure the ad by calling for a boycott. Advocating boycotts is a form of speech protected by the First Amendment. As Nat Hentoff, journalistic custodian of the First Amendment, says, "I would hate to see boycotts...
Throughout his manual, O'Rourke maintains a tone of caustic irony. It fails to disguise a moralist concerned with a lapse of decorum and values. In a discussion of capital punishment, the condemned is told, "Try to think of something piquant to say on your way to the gas chamber. 'See you in hell, Mom,' is nice. Things like . . . 'Don't stop to mourn, organize' sound too stiff for what's basically an informal situation." It is at such times that the mask of the mockingbird slips off to reveal the owl beneath, hooting at a world he is furiously...
...Khmer Rouge, whom the arch-moralist Jimmy Carter called "the worst % violators of human rights in the world," became an instrument to drive the Vietnamese out of Kampuchea...
...earnest plonkers had written this clumsy, lively, thoroughly entertaining family saga of war and romance, no reader would have puzzled over deep currents that seem unaccountably shallow. Anthony Burgess, however, is one of literature's certified mandarins, known as an explicator of Ulysses (Re Joyce), a postapocalyptic moralist (A Clockwork Orange), and a scholar showily at home in a double handful of ancient and modern languages. He wigwags strenuously at the outset of this new novel that primal, mythic stuff is ahead -- ancient tales threading through the dark, tribal roots of 20th century bloody-mindedness...