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...sensitives with neither the lungs for a novel nor the brains for polemic or criticism. This is not the case, of course. Out of great sorrows come little songs, and out of little sorrows come short stories. Still, the man who presumes to take an hour out of the reader's life had better have some comedy or magic up his sleeve. John Cheever does. His much anthologized piece, The Enormous Radio, again presents its enigmas. Cheever examines modern technological superstitions-deus in machina-in the form of a radio set with God's own ear for private...
Heinrich BÖll's Enter and Exit, a story of the first and last days of World War II, is technically no more demanding than a run-of-the-mill yarn in the old Saturday Evening Post, but the reader follows BÖll's hero willingly. Although the psychology is unsubtle and the theme not far from trite, BÖll deals in reality...
This comic picaresque stuff is so easy to read that the reader might fail to notice Céline's didactic intentions. Courtial is Yongkind, grown up and equipped with a degree from the polytechnic, but the same optimistic cretin. In the person of Courtial, Celine pours all the vitriol of his prose on an age that believed science and progress would confer inestimable benefits upon mankind. Courtial's windy rhetoric on the subject of these benefits is mocked by the hiss of hot gases from his chronically punctured blimp. By the time the first great technological...
...section "Voices of Revolution" is especially interesting because it brings the reader into the atmosphere of a political rally. Leaders from Venezuela, Mozambique, and Peru pound out the inexorable logic of their position, call for unity of classes, and preach nationalism. The spout neo-Marxian polemics--"We have nothing to lose but the chains that destroy our dignity;" and the revolutionary vocabulary of diatribe--"imperialism," "industrial reserve army," and "pauperization...
...charmed reader may want to know more than Anthologist Lewis reveals about his contributors, who are identified only by name, age and the countries where he found them. If the spark can burn so widely and so brightly, and at so lovely an age, what kindles it? Who nourishes it? And why does it sometimes go out? Lewis is content to let the poets be judged by their work, and perhaps he is right...