Word: goncourts
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...they tell him about the representation of nature, the science of color and harmony! How freely the air flows around these objects!" Few painters have ever had such a press as the one which, interrupted by a few decades of neglect after his death, greeted Chardin from Diderot, the Goncourt brothers, Gide, Proust and dozens of others...
Dostoyevsky thought him a haughty poseur; the Goncourt brothers found him an amiable giant. He wrangled with Tolstoy, befriended Zola, intrigued Carlyle, enchanted Henry James. He was at once a hunter of game and celebrity, a well-traveled man of letters, and a provincial Russian. Ivan Turgenev's life is several lives, and by now several biographies should have recounted them. Yet, as Critic V.S. Pritchett notes, there has not been a definitive biography of Turgenev in any language...
...grief-stricken Adam and Eve in Masaccio's Expulsion from Eden, and that turns the enormous grainy effigy of John Kennedy (then dead), with its repeated pointing hand, into a type of vengeful deity. Rauschenberg has had great moments of social irony. "The day will come," Edmond de Goncourt wrote in his journal in 1861, "when all the modern nations will adore a sort of American god, about whom much will have been written in the popular press; and images of this god will be set up in the churches, not as the imagination of each individual painter may fancy...
Understandably, the experience has in stilled in Konig a morbid determinism that makes the Goncourt brothers look like Harpo and Chico Marx: "Gone now are February and March, season of drowned men, when ice on the frozen rivers melts, yielding up the winter's harvest of junkies, itinerants and prostitutes. Soon to come are July and August - the jackknife months. Heat and homicide. Bullet holes, knife wounds, fatal garrotings, a grisly procession vomited out of the steamy ghettos of the inner city...
...prize money will scarcely allow Novelist Laine to do more than make a polite purchase of the runner-up's oeuvre. Nonetheless, the honor should secure his novel sales of up to half-a-million copies. Even if public taste should deem La Dentellière a "bad" Goncourt, the odds are that at least 200,000 Frenchmen will be reading what the author calls a "novel of noncommunication" and what one reviewer more fully described as the account of an unhappy love affair between a broken-down aristocratic student and a working-class beautician who goes mad when...