Word: comptons
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Darkness and Day, by Ivy Compton-Burnett. Further astonishing dilemmas of some of Compton-Burnett's genteel English characters; contrived mainly to let the characters gossip unconventionally about life, death and each other (TIME, March...
...made to keep the tennis rivalry going. The teams do not meet in lacrosse or track. None of the major sport schedules will be curtailed. Since relatively few schools compete in crew, it would be difficult to cut down here, and the teams will continue to race for the Compton...
When the original Oedipus found that he was married to his own mother, he put out his eyes and wandered blindly to his death. Edmund and Bridget Lovat, the principal characters in Ivy Compton-Burnett's new opus, are more modern. They survive the news that they are father & daughter as well as man & wife, and become quite reconciled to the idea. "Such unions do no harm in nature," says Edmund. "Perhaps people are braver than they used to be," says Bridget. "What a change, and in a way an interest for us!'' says Edmund...
Darkness and Day is modeled pretty much on the same plan as every other Compton-Burnett novel (this is her twelfth). Incest, illegitimacy and the pangs of growing old are merely the convenient props for her main interest: what a variegated cast of characters have to say about life & death and each other...
...lively gossip to offer in exchange. Naturally, the domestic service is not always what it might be, but nobody really cares, because everybody is too deeply engaged in talking. "We seem to be living in a play," protests one respectable young lady. And so they are, with Stage Manager Compton-Burnett keeping comedy always slightly ahead of tragedy, and fashioning surprise endings for some of her characters' more startling dilemmas that could almost be called happy-but for the fact that the solutions often raise dilemmas as startling as the ones they solve. Her highly polished little plays...