Word: prokosch
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...only hope for American literature, Lewisohn concluded, is to be found in the work of such prose writers as Thornton Wilder, and such modern poets as Frederic Prokosch, Karl Shapiro, and Peter Viereck. He especially commended Vierock, who, he said, has been alone in his attempt to "convey with lucidity and power certain fundamental realities. of the spirit of man-which is the true purpose of all literature...
STORM AND ECHO (274 pp.)-Frederic Prokosch-Doubleday...
...young Yale professor had an immediate success with a first novel, The Asiatics. Frederic Prokosch had written a story so flamboyantly adventurous and so rich in pure writing talent that to carp at its philosophical maunderings seemed petty. Wrote Nobel Prizewinner Thomas Mann: "I count it among the most brilliant and original achievements of the young literary generation." The trouble is that Prokosch has gone on writing variants of the same book for 13 years. His latest is Storm and Echo, like The Asiatics, a blend of far places, strange and terrible events, and a murky, anguished, generally unsuccessful search...
...Prokosch character is ever really motivated by goals so easily stated. It is Marius who blows his top one night and rips down the facade of their pretenses: "We've all been lying. Cheating. Masquerading . . . What is it we're really after? . . . One wants peace. Another wants love. A third wants faith. A fourth wants power. It's all very simple. And rather absurd...
Just how absurd it all is readers of Storm and Echo will discover. Of his earlier gifts, Prokosch still retains a descriptive talent that can make the heat, the stench, and the occasional beauty of the African jungle almost tangible. Stripped of its pretentious symbolism, its agonized soul-searching, this could have been a good travel book. But the vivid jungle is matted and twined with the perilous Africa cliché, reminiscent of Hollywood's stock treatment: "Well," he muttered, staring up at the constellations, "don't go too deep into Africa. Don't try to grasp...