Monday, November 21, 2011

One Flew Over the Thesaurus Nest

I loved the Ken Kesey novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest when I was in high school. So much better than the movie. So when I saw this review - retrospective for the upcoming 50th anniversary edition I was excited. Then I started reading the review - and I started to laugh at it (not with it). All I could think of was this Venn diagram:
But instead of an English teacher it was a guy writing for Vanity Fair trying to impress the reader with his vocabulary, world view and insight into the mind of Ken Kesey. Here's some examples:
...industrious output over a span of years that pyramids into an oeuvre...
...ingenious simplicity of Kesey’s narrative approach was to treat the page as a proscenium stage...
...Kesey’s sanitarium serves as a multiple microcosm for institutional society...
...To use a George Bushism, Nurse Ratched is the Decider...
...Kesey created a primal, cross-tribal bond between McMurphy and Chief Bromden—a towering Native American who pretends to be deaf and dumb and spends his days robotically sweeping the floor—that is James Fenimore Cooper’s Deerslayer and Chingachgook redux...
...like the jolly roar at the banquet table in a Victorian romp when some chinless lord cracks a funny...
If nothing else the review made me chuckle and made me think about reading the book or seeing the movie again.


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