Word: missolonghi
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...MISSOLONGHI MANUSCRIPT by Frederic Prokosch. 338 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux...
...much. He was a good if not great poet; he was handsome; he could swim the Hellespont, even with a game leg; he had affairs with men as well as women including, some believe, his half sister. He was also a political rebel. When he died at 34 in Missolonghi, Greece, he was planning and financing a revolt against the Turkish oppressors...
This is the man whom Novelist Frederic Prokosch (The Seven Who Fled) tries to catch in undress. Normally an imaginative writer with considerable flair, Prokosch here employs the tired conceit that Byron left three notebooks at Missolonghi in which he reconstructed his life. As fiction, the book may appeal to those who want to see a flamboyant figure oscillate between homosexuality and heterosexuality with the nice indifference of a metronome. Prokosch uses all the four-letter words that his earlier elegance would have found quite supererogatory. Even more drearily, there is nothing new here about Byron. The hero...