Word: authorization
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1980
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Percy's last novel Lancelot, the reader can't be sure whether these ideas are the product of a sane mind, ideas with which the author concurs--or whether they are lunatic ravings. It's a very convenient device for Percy. He can say controversial things about war, about Nazis and Jews, about other sensitive subjects and still leave room for himself to disavow then if a reader gets too offended. But in The Second Coming, Percy introduces a new sort of character--the genuine schizophrenic, not a mouthpiece for his own questionable ideas but a true dysfunctional. Allison...
...Percy's last novel Lancelot, the reader can't be sure whether these ideas are the product of a sane mind, ideas with which the author concurs--or whether they are lunatic ravings. It's a very convenient device for Percy. He can say controversial things about war, about Nazis and Jews, about other sensitive subjects and still leave room for himself to disavow then if a reader gets too offended. But in The Second Coming, Percy introduces a new sort of character--the genuine schizophrenic, not a mouthpiece for his own questionable ideas but a true dysfunctional. Allison...
...external sign. the conclusion Percy provides his novel with, however, is more than a philosophical cop-out. It rips out his inspirational taproot: his refusal to explain away or excuse the psychological dilemmas of his characters. It turns out, you see, that Barrett's delusions--blown up by the author into chapters' worth of prose--are caused by an imbalance in the pH of his bloodstream, easily correctable by the addition of hydrogen ions. Percy's reduction of the alienated condition of man to a manageable chemical problem mocks not only all his own best writing but also some very...
...asks the reader--Percy? Allison? It would be very easy for he author to clean up some of these passages--like Barrett's first-person tirades against his father, unexpectedly thrown into passages of third-person narrative--simply by substituting a name for a pronoun here, adding quotation marks there...
...orders to go on tugging their forelocks. There are a few survivors who still remember the dim and faded glory of the English country house, but for most of us this book of photographs will have to do. In fact, it does very nicely, with just enough text by Author Christopher Simon Sykes to explain the pictures but not enough to smother them with sociology...