Word: spinoza
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...author aims most effectively for the mind's ear; his fiction is filled with exuberant noise, the din of voices demanding attention, explaining themselves, complaining about the way the world has treated them. "Man has no more freedom than a bedbug," insists one. "In this respect, Spinoza was right." Another tells how jealousy drove him crazy: "I now hated all women. Lifting my hands to heaven, I swore never to marry." The narrator asks, "Did you keep your word?" The laconic response: "I have six grandchildren." Singer's people seldom shy away from expounding on the mysteries of existence: "People...
...many a Cuban home, it has a dusty attic quality, the poignancy of a well-cared-for poverty. The apartment's contents are fairly typical. A high shelf has been turned into a home-made altar, crowded with Catholic icons. Below is a shelf stuffed with the works of Spinoza, Graham Greene, Raymond Chandler. Between the two is a huge black-and-white TV set on which, boasts its owner, he can sometimes catch programs from the U.S. All through the place a ceaseless whine crackles out of a bright red Phillips boom box, bought under the counter...
...skepticism also leaves the author unmoved. A British journalist and former editor of the New Statesman, Johnson seems to have had a bellyful of bland uncertainty. Besides, the feverish riddles of Ezekiel and the prophetic agonies of Job make better copy than the Tractatus of Spinoza. Johnson singles out the 17th century philosopher as the sort of non-Jewish Jew who sacrifices the soul of rationalism to cold logic. He quotes Soviet Writer Isaac Babel's self-mocking definition of a Jewish intellectual ("a man with spectacles on his nose and autumn in his heart") and brands Marx and Freud...
...early 1945, Anton Steenwijk (Marc van Uchelen) lives under the shadow of the Nazi occupation of Haarlem. Despite the food and fuel shortages, the almost-defeated Nazis have a minimal effect on the lives of the Steenwijk family, who try to evade history by translating Homer, reading Spinoza, and playing board games...
...Steenwijk family plays board games, reads Spinoza and believes that a sound classical education constitutes an excellent preparation for life. Outside, in January 1945, the war is still going on. But aside from a shortage of food and fuel, it has not troubled this serenely bourgeois Dutch family. And with the Germans obviously headed for defeat, they may perhaps be forgiven the slightly smug aura that hovers about them. It seems as if their faith in the eternal values of liberal humanism has triumphed over the hurly-burly of modern history...