Customer Reviews

Various Voices: Prose, Poetry, Politics

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Harold Pinter speaks his own... dialect... without cliches.

As my native language is Greek I usually find the English language plain... not this time!

Harold Pinter here attempts to remove the blindfold from most of us and on our behalf...

Intelligent and impulsive.

What a dramatist Harold Pinter was. David Mamet and other minimalists of the world stage owe their literary vision to Pinter's trailblazing works for theater. When I saw "The Homecoming," one of his many masterpieces, at the Bouwerie Lane Theater in 1973, my life changed. I had long known that film could so many things that theater could not, but not until this play did I realize theater could do many things that film could not. I strongly recommend any Pinter play, as I have read or seen them all 40-plus of them. But this book is a compendium of his poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, including his political philippics. No doubt, this Nobel laureate is a playwright and screenwriter of the highest level, and while his other writings do not rise to this level, they offer profound insight into Pinter's worldview, dramatic persona, and sudden wit. This book is a must-read for Pinter students

If Pinter contented himself with Becket- Ionesco- like dialogues of the deaf, poetic renderings of fragmented human inadequacy then it would be possible to appreciate a certain poetic quality in him. But he like a good Stalinist has to dictate for us the nature of our political reality, and in doing so turns out to be a truly one- sided fanatic, choosing what to my mind, are the bad- guys in every conflict in the world. His hatred of America is in my mind sickening and unfair. He makes the best into the worst, and celebrates radical terrorists and other chic dirt.

Boo.