Word: bleakness
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...reproach of blank canvas. Lena goes shopping once a week, toys dispiritedly with the notion of leaving Clem and the airless gloom that enshrouds him. Clem reads her thoughts and reminds her: "If you left me, I'd fall down. But so would you" Hanley lightens this bleak, static scene only once-with a long flashback to World War II and the London blitz, when Clem, Lena and the other tenants trooped down the stairs to spend nights of fear in the cellar. Here, A Dream Journey takes on special intensity. The dream is a nightmare, and small, carefully...
Although the basketball team has had a dismal 1-6 start, the season has not been as bleak as their record indicates...
...declamatory, powerful War Requiem (1962), which deploys huge forces and intersperses liturgical Latin with antiwar poetry, is perhaps his best work. Not one to compose in a vacuum or ivory tower, Britten in 1948 joined with friends to found the Aldeburgh Festival in a little town on the bleak Suffolk coast he called home...
...Beattie develops her characters with enough skill to avoid most of the tedium that can set in when you describe boring lives. The first 100 pages of Chilly Scenes get a little hard to take--the characters lead such bleak lives, moving between depressions, neuroses and unemployment--and some of the stories in Distortions undermine the characters' reality in their tendency towards absurdism. Still, Beattie includes enough gentle humor in her presentation to keep you interested. You come to hope desperately for resolution, for an end to the emptiness and an advent of warmth. Beattie isn't liable to satisfy...
...books were published simultaneously, and on the whole the claim that she is one of the most promising writers around right now seems justified. Both Chilly Scenes, a novel, and Distortions, a collection of short stories, center on the same theme: the emptiness of relationships formed through inertia, the bleak mindlessness of lives without purpose...