Word: joycean
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...point he pauses over a particular problem to ask, "now, why is that? is there an essay somewhere I can read on that? is it of import? or shall I go on?" Portnoy, with his daydreams and his failures, is actually much closer to that other Joycean hero, Leopold Bloom. The more Portnoy dredges up his past, the more it cripples him. He never achieves even Stephen's nominative freedom, for the mind is the one part of the man that can never expatriate...
While the overall tone of the book is tragic and almost elegiac, the individual scenes are often hilarious and demonstrate Donleavy's adeptness at using his lyrical Joycean prose to explore human emotions. A scene of touching pathos, for example, is broken up when Balthazar is discovered naked and feverishly ill in Breda's bed by her employer's wife. The female fight that follows is unmatched in literature for its comic ferocity. Hair curlers are grabbed, bellies butted, Balthazar's breakfast food spilled, bottles of urine knocked over, dresses ripped-all while Balthazar lies abed...
...script beneath the pictures reads like one of John Lennon's semiliterate Joycean pastiches. Flabby punjabs pass for wit ("Are you bluish? You don't look bluish"), and the boys' voyage is filled with stilted symbolism. In one scene, the quartet passes by the Sea of Phrenology, where huge heads of Moses, Cicero, Freud and Einstein loom; John recalls that a fellow named Ulysses also went on a journey. Ultimately, however, what is wrong with the film is the Beatles. They are not in it. Except for the songs and a final sequence in which they appear...
...same is true of Sagarana (U.S. edition: 1966), a cycle of stories in which Guimarāes Rosa's Joycean prose turns the folklore and rough-and-tumble of backwoods life into a fresh order of experience. Unfortunately, much of the wordplay, coinages, dialect and rhythms are lost in the passage from Portuguese to English...
...entirely abandoned books and boxes. Painted cutout silhouettes of the latter hang in their own black frames, subtly suggesting the ax about to fall. A curiously shaped book, its ten pages cut in lacy patterns and stippled with rainbow dots, contains Samaras' own moody, erotically Joycean fantasies (even Grove Press, he claims, refused to print them). Samaras' most celebrated boxes are his huge, walk-in mirrored rooms (TIME, May 3), and his latest one will be a nine-foot-tall tower. An exercise in claustrophobia, it will force visitors to shrink as they climb its inner stairs. When...