Word: sinuously
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Dates: during 1960-1960
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This startling first novel is a sinuous pagan rite. Faith is a sort of classic nymph, but instead of trees, rivers and mountains, she haunts galleries, fine restaurants and her tasteful London house. Jacques is an ageless satyr, but instead of tootling the pipes of Pan in some mythic glade, he rummages in London garbage cans and beds down on park benches. He is human dirt, but of a kind that makes the earth earthy. She is refined past the point of passion, yet curiously unawakened, nervously expectant. In the hands of a less urbane stylist, a sexual encounter between...
...Durrell, 35, has not neglected his writing. In fact, he shows his brother's gift for impaling the vivid butterfly of reality on the point of a pen. Only a very special zoologist could look at a white-bodied, black-footed mongoose and observe: "She was sleek, sinuous, and svelte, and reminded me of a creamy-skinned Parisienne belle-amie clad in nothing more than two pairs of black silk stockings...
...basic appeal remained: an air of geysering exuberance that seemed to reveal the dance to its emotional roots. Included were dances of tribal ritual, scenes of village life, a fairy tale about how the lions gained mastery over the panthers-all excitingly expressed in bounding leaps and spins, in sinuous, shuffling walk. The sets were sometimes too elegant and the costumes sometimes too flossy, but in one department of stagecraft the company had scored a clear triumph: New York, which last year had forced the women to wear brassieres, last week permitted them to dance bare-breasted-presumably in deference...
...craftsmanlike touches, which had been passed down through 2,000 years of Egyptian civilization. Artisans eschewed the hard-tipped metal tools used by foreign sculptors, pounded away at the quarry rock with stone cutting tools, polished the finished work with quartz sand. Details such as the echeloned curls, sinuous eyebrows, and almond-shaped eyes of the Girl with a Late Period Bob were painstakingly sculpted. So perfect was the technique of these artisans that even today no modern steel cutting tool can achieve the same sable smoothness on hard stone...
...Cinderella and Sylvia. What he was trying to suggest, says Ashton, was "the ebb and flow of the sea: I aimed at an unbroken continuity of dance, which would remove the distinction between aria and recitative." As a result, Ondine offered few pyrotechnics, gained its effects instead through sinuous mass movements in which the undulation of arm and body suggested forests of sea plants stirring to unseen tides. The sense of submarine fantasy was reinforced by Stage Designer Lila de Nobili's fine scenery: a castle of mist and fruitfulness, shadowy crags and waterfalls, aqueous skies streaked pink...