Word: absurdities
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...determined effort to re-connect herself with the world that other people live in. As a convalescent, she takes a job and, reluctantly, attends a cocktail party given by an old school friend. But she cannot achieve anything beyond a momentary rapport with the guests; she penetrates the absurd triviality of their preoccupations all too readily and retreats, bewildered, convinced that the fault must lie within herself...
...value. He seduces her, simultaneously initiating into the only experience which seems to her to contain its own meaning and effecting his own cure. When he leaves, she suffers a relapse, but eventually struggles out of it. Dispassionately, she returns to her initial view of life as comic, absurd and ultimately conditioned by chance. Rejecting the mothering safety of adjustment, she chooses to preserve her own integrity at the risk of an isolation that might again plunge her into despair...
Dawson's heroine sees the world as an absurd jungle of animal and people, some real, some imaginary--all searching for meaning in their own ways, none finding it. She describes the confusion very vividly and then remarks, "Nothing in the jungle is ordained." This illustrates perhaps the most outstanding characteristic of the author's quietly individualistic style: her ability to state a complex perception in a simple, memorable way, without losing the overtones of the special experiences prompting...
...Samuel Abbott has transformed himself into a most excellently bloated and insufferable Tolloller. He has managed, somehow, to blend the most absurd elements of Oscar Wilde, Charles Laughton and Peter Ustinov into one vast horror of inane snobbery and scented incompetence. Only Mr. Abbott's Tolloller could have successfully produced, as he did, the quintessential Gilbertian line: "We were boys together;--at least...
...MUCH for the first chapter. In his nightmare inversion of C.P. Snow, Mr. Wilson has exposed the inadequacy of the decent man in a struggle for power, the moral bankruptcy of the struggle itself, and has even suggested that every such struggle may be inherently absurd. He has also written a magnificently sustained, if harsh, parody of Snow's novels. World he had left is at that...