Word: piteously
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...hinges on the rising in Mayo, and there, in the euphoria of the French landing, the cause catches fire. In centuries hence, the Irish will sing of the glorious Men of the West and the humiliation of the British at Castlebar. This is all history, and so is the piteous climax, as Lord Cornwallis sweeps in with his troops against the rebels, determined not to endure another Yorktown. In his prodigious first novel, Thomas Flanagan grants this historic episode a new and panoramic life...
...across the Brooklyn Bridge to the World Trade Center, where Richard Pryor reigns as the Wiz. But before Dorothy gets there, she meets a roarious but cowardly lion (Ted Ross) and a marvelous scarecrow (Michael Jackson), hung up on his pole and tormented by rascally birds. Jackson sings a piteous lament, to the effect that "you can't win, you can't break even, and you can't get out of the game." Wiz Composer Charlie Smalls is a gifted comic writer, and soon Nipsey Russell, whose rusty tin man is easily the best characterization...
...third triumph is Robert Moberly's ludicrous yet piteous Sir Andrew, whose cough cannot conceal a basically pasty-faced visage. For him plant stalks are a snare, his nose a source of itching, he skin a meal for flies and mosquitoes. Moberly is amazingly inventive; he runs the risk of submerging Anddrew in a dictionary of shtick, but succeeds in making it all work. I do not recall ever seeing any of Shakespeare's peripheral comics played more engagingly...
...their mock family ties, the characters have neither significant pasts nor coherent motives. The ranks of terrorists may indeed be filled with such hollow, existential punks, but a novelist can hardly let it go at that. Theroux himself cannot seem to decide whether their emptiness is contemptible or piteous. And since they contemplate violence as an end rather than a means, they lack the framework of a political cause that might define them...
...WRITING in A Woman Named Solitude is so surely tied to the psyches of its characters that this chronicle of slave revolt in 18th century Guadeloupe is nothing like a parade of piteous horrors. Andre Schwarz-Bart, a French Jew who survived Nazi camps and Resistance fighting and has already given us one masterpiece, gets into the mindscape of each French colonial and transplanted African tribesman. He dramatizes their religious and political tensions with precise evocations of war and ritual, and he compresses his narrative to unsentimental essentials. The book is both poem and protest; more than a simple howl...