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Lecherous Eunuch. The honeymoon of East and West is over, and Rama's intellectual career runs into a terrible occident. Logic seems to be the trouble (Hindus have a system of their own, a very non-Aristotelian affair). To the Western reader, Rama-whether in conflict with a Catholic, a Communist or a Freudian- appears, in the female manner, to counter an argument with a story about something else. Rama's efforts to Orientalize Europe's recent social and intellectual history are puzzling. He may be "devoted to Truth and all that," but what are Westerners...
...book, published in 1956, was mean as "a sober assessment of small boy when left alone," according to its author. Although he said in such an allegory "all hell will break loose with no constraints," Golding remarked that a reader's mood at the end of Lord of the Film should be "sober, thoughtful, on the whole optimistic...
This should be the most horrible book ever written. Actually, thanks to Wylie's jaunty, business-as-usual prose, the effect is quite different. As long as there is a novelist with the old know-how, all is not lost. The reader of this Tom-Swift-in-Hell story has the choice of a dozen characters with whom it should be a privilege to identify. There is this tycoon, an old Walter Huston type, rich enough to dig a two or three hundred million dollar fur-lined funk hole under his Connecticut Shangrila. There is his nice ginny wife...
...reader is well ahead of these cartoon types: half the book is over before they have grasped the fact that there are no outside commitments whatever left to keep them all from integrating in the nicest way. But the children (abandoned by Wylie's old enemy-their Mom) have the right word for all this horror show. "Geography," they say as they tend their lessons down below. "Geography, fui!" Also, history, philosophy, art, science and probably theology. In the outcome of the Wylie fable, all these little things are left in the hands of the Australians...
There are enough villains to populate Dante's Inferno: priests, bishops, mothers, fathers, Falangists, high society, low society, expatriates. Del Castillo is a kind of chatty Virgil who takes his readers on a tour of these monsters, pausing before them for ponderous comments like "Oh, the mysteries of life." It is not that the light touch is beyond Del Castillo. A felicitous phrase occasionally escapes him: they had "the habit of sprinkling theft and graft with holy water." It is just that he cannot refrain from constantly clubbing his characters senseless. In a matter of three pages, he manages...