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  1. Life is Struggle

    And so on. Whether Portnoy, or Roth, is being fair to Jewish mothers has been a matter of debate. Kingsley Amis said that there would be fewer Mrs Portnoys if there were fewer Alex Portnoys. Certainly the portrait of the devouring mother is monstrous, as is, in compensation, that of the frenzied whacker off. Since Auschwitz it has been forbidden to present the Jews as people subject to the faults of the rest of humanity. Roth has the courage to wish to show things as he has experienced them, but ...
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  2. Chinese Herbs

    Narayan is the best of the Indian writers in English -- graceful, economical, realistic but drawn to fantasy, gently humorous -- and the fictional territory of Malgudi he has created is perhaps as important a contribution to modern literature as Patrick White's Sarsaparilla or even Hardy's Wessex. He writes so consistently well that it is painful to limit him to a single book, but The Vendor of Sweets can be taken as a way into the others. Its hero is Jagan, middle-aged, a widower with a son, the ...
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  3. How to Reduce Stress

    Muriel Spark must have considered that she was not doing full justice to her talents by exercising it only in small fictional forms. This, however, is her only attempt at a fullsize novel. The theme and the setting are alike promising. The heroine is half-Jewish and half British county family, and she has been converted to Catholicism (this is the author's own position). She goes to Jerusalem to make a pilgrimage to the holy places, but Israel and Jordan share Jerusalem between them, snarling at ...
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  4. Natural Resources

    Especially interesting is Jocelin, the dean of a medieval cathedral which seems to have affinities with that of Salisbury. He has a vision of a four-hundred-foot spire erected to the divine glory. But is this vision really derived from God, and is the motive one of pure worship? The addition of the spire to the cathedral involves the commission of more acts of evil than seems proper for an innocent human undertaking. Is the devil behind it? The spire itself is an "unruly member", and the ...
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  5. One Purpose of School

    As with so much of Huxley's later fiction, one is not sure whether or not to call this book a true novel. It is less concerned with telling a tale than with presenting an attitude to life, it is weak on characterization but strong on talk, crammed with ideas and uncompromisingly intellectual. Huxley shows us an imaginary tropical island where the good life can be cultivated for the simple reason that the limitations and potentialities of man are thoroughly understood. He presents a conspectus of ...
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