Review
A 1965 Time magazine review of P.M. Pasinetti’s book The Smile on the Face of the Lion (Random House: 1965) said this:
"While it lasts, it's a spectacular show of style. Pasinetti, a Venetian who is currently professor of Italian at U.C.L.A., seems to have derived his literary manner in equal measure from Marcel Proust, Ian Fleming, Bernard Shaw and Michelangelo Antonioni—for whom he has done odd jobs of scriptwriting. Like Antonioni, he writes pattern instead of plot, and composes episodes that go nowhere slowly. Like Proust, he wanders for pages in indirect discourse—A tells B what C said to D about E—to populate and inflect his social scene, and sinks continually into interior monologue to liberate a character's stream of consciousness. Like Shaw, Pasinetti hits off his minor personages with one swift stroke of wit: "She addresses people always with the air of a lady asking for road directions from behind the wheel of an extremely classy automobile." Like Fleming, he prefers to imagine that all women' are beautiful and that sex is the supreme experience. "Her entire leg was in close contact with his, pressed against him from the hip to the ankle. He moved his hand over her face in a slow, strong caress. 'You know,' she said, 'I don't take tranquilizers any more.' " With such prose available, there should be no need."
Read more about this topic: P. M. Pasinetti
Famous quotes containing the word review:
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