Word: neo
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...were past caring and past caring about. Truffaut's centrifugal direction sends pieces of crime thriller, love story, and psychological case study flying off at unrelated tangents. Moreover, Piano Player suggests that the New Wave is carrying its own logic to absurdity. Together with the Neo-Realist school of French fiction led by Novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet (TIME, July 20), the New Wave set out to give the "object" its due. In Piano Player, things-the honky-tonk piano, the hero's brass bed, an auto careening through the night-are vibrantly and almost independently alive...
After Britain's small but noisy neo-Nazi movement provoked a Trafalgar Square riot with anti-Semitic speeches two weeks ago, a pro-Labor country squire, Lord Walston, wrote the London Observer an angry letter calling for extensive laws to curb excesses in public speech. Replying a week later, mischievous Satirist Evelyn Waugh, 59, penned his own modest proposal to the lord. Wrote Waugh: "May I commend to him a group whose interests, I am sure, lie near his heart: his own peers? . . . They have, like the Jews, been the objects of frequent, atrocious attack. They are now held...
...Change of Heart: to substitute "you." The device is hardly revolutionary, as any reader of syndicated Sports Columnist Jimmy Cannon knows (You are Sugar Ray. Your legs are wobbly, etc.). But through it Butor gains a considerable advantage over non-you writers in achieving another aim of the Neo-Realists-to inspire in the reader not sympathy for the central character, but a kind of empathetic identification with...
Many of their books, turgid with description, tormented by tricks, are all but unreadable. Most demand far more persistence than any reader (except, possibly, a fellow writer studying technique) will ever-or should ever-give. The plunging power of one outstanding Neo-Realist, Claude Simon, dissipates too often in Faulknerian tangles-1000-word sentences and sets-within-sets of parenthetical statements. Inevitably, too, as experimenters, Neo-Realists have wallowed in pretentious critical nonsense. Their mechanical techniques, almost inevitably, have allowed a number of non-novelists to masquerade as writers of fiction. Neo-Realist Marguerite Duras' pure conversational tour...
Nevertheless, the Neo-Realists are serving a purpose in trying to re-examine dreary literary habits, to rework the weary forms, the traditional plots, to stand time on its head and cut capers-as Ionesco, Beckett and Gelber have done in the theater. Whatever results finally, readers at least can be grateful that Neo-Realism's Big Three have discarded as outworn one increasingly obnoxious habit of the standard novelists. They do not bother to describe sex in morbid detail. That alone, if it catches on, could set the novel ahead ten years...