KANSAN REVIEWS
FILMS: The Undergraduate
By MIKE SHEARER Arts & Reviews Editor
On its own two feet. Goodbye, Columbus could not stand.
Symbolically, it is advertised as a "New York version of The Graduate." Whatever qualities Goodbye, Columbus has which seem to combine something from New York and The Graduate really could have been left uncombined.
The most glaring similarity between The Graduate and Goodbye, Columbus is the obnoxious view of the materialistic over-30 set. While effectively portrayed by Anne Bancroft in The Graduate, the stereotypes in Goodbye, Columbus is shallow and unjust.
The over-30ers in this flick would fit easily into almost any television situation comedy. That's no compliment.
Richard Benjamin stands out as an accomplished actor, playing the young man who just doesn't have the materialistic drive despite pressures from over-30ers. Benjamin handles his scene in the library, where he tries to show concern to a young black reader, with a sincerity and conviction lacking throughout most of the film.
Why did director Larry Peerce choose to develop Benjamin's girlfriend into a sympathetic character until near the end of the film when her weakness and her subservience to societal pressures expose her as a spineless agent of the over-30s?
After such a development, the movie could not have ended with anything but an uncomfortable conclusion.
Besides Benjamin's performance and the music by The Association, the movie has a few memorable lines buried within the dull dialogue.
The leading lady is asked by a rather shallow-type acquaintance, "What have you been doing all summer?"
She replies, dryly, "Growing a penis."
But such laughs are scarce.
And with theaters filled with well-made films about the generation thing ("If is," I think, the best), there is very little reason to expect young people to grasp ahold of Goodbye, Columbus as they did The Graduate.
There is simply nothing in Goodbye, Columbus which is worth gripping.
BOOKS: Man as sexual animal
By United Press International Sex, Man & Society, by Ashley Montague. Putnam, $6.95.
By United Press International
Through history man as a sexual animal has reproduced himself successfully, sometimes without understanding the process. Some Australian aborigines made no connection between cause and effect. Moorish women once thought a fetus could sleep and awaken two years after conception.
More bizarre, perhaps, are the myths and mores that have evolved about the emotional and
Historically, he points out, society, by repressing sex, has stimulated interest in it out of proportion to its biological or psychological importance. He notes our debt to the Kinsey reports but faults them because "the best that Kinsey can do with human emotions is to say they exist."
psychological aspects of sexual experience. In this book the author, a distinguished anthropologist, details the gradual enlightenment of man on the place of sex in society.
Best sellers
(UPD)
(Compiled by Publishers' Weekly)
Fitzpatrick
THE GODFATHER--Mario Puzo
THE LOVE MACHINE
THE LOVE MACHINE
Jacqueline Susann
TREATMENT GROUP
BROADWAY
THE LOVE MACHINE—
Jacqueline Susan
THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN—
Mikael Crichton
Michael Crichton
PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT—
Philip Roth
THE PRETENDERS--Gwen Davis
abokov
EXCEPT FOR ME AND THEE-
NAKED CAME THE STRANGER—
Penelone Ashe
Fenelope Ashe
THE GOODBYE LOOK—
Drew Mendelso
SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE-
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Nonfiction
THE PETER PRINCIPLE—Laurence
Porter and David Mull
and Raymond Hall
THE KINGDOM AND THE POWER-
GATE剧院
Gay Talese
THE MAKING OF THE PRESIDENT
THE MAKING OF THE PRESIDENT
1968 - Theodore H. White
BETWEEN PARENT AND TEEN
AGDR—Dr. Haim G. Ginott
1968—Theodore H. White
BETWEEN PARENT AND TEEN-
ERNEST HEMINGY—Carlos Baker
AN UNFINISHED WOMAN—
"
AN UNFINISHED WOMAN—
Lillian Hellman
MISS CRAIG'S 21-DAY SHAPE-UP PROGRAM FOR MEN AND
Craig
THE MONEY GAME
Smith
THE 900 DAYS—Harrison Salisbury
including sex-education. Too many people, he contends, are "victims of an insane conspiracy of silence and confusion about sex which serves to rob them of equilibrium and happiness."
LONG RANGE VIEW
spotlight
Hesse translations great
ST. LOUIS, Mo. (UPI)—This spring and summer, St. Louis has had twice the normal amount of rain, ruining most weekends, and many people are feeling mighty low.
Arts & Reviews Editor
By MIKE SHEARER
Arts & Reviews Editor
For those of you who left off with Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf or Siddhartha, there is a whole world of Hesse still waiting for you.
Three Hesse novels have been released in the United States this year, Narcissus and Goldmund, Gertrude and Peter Camenzind (all three by Farrar, Strauss & Giroux), and all three have much to offer Hesse enthusiasts.
Narcissus and Goldmund is probably Hesse's finest work. New York Times' book columns praised it as his best. It was given a wonderful translation. It seems to be the most poetic and beautiful tale of a young man faced with the dualisms in life, the repeated theme of Hesse.
I don't think Hesse's conclusion to Narcissus and Goldmud can fail to haunt the reader for a long while. In this conclusion, Hesse's Goldmund asks Narcissus the question that most needs asking today.
Horticulturist Lad Cutak had some good news for those who like a long-range view of things: The trees will be doubly beautiful when they change colors this fall.
But it is such an experience that I'll leave the question in Hesse's book . . . for everyone else to find.
***
Similarly, Hermann Hesse, renowned for his literary psychology, was a knowledgeable psychologist even before he came under the influence of the writings of Sigmund Freud, as shown in Peter Camenzind, his first novel.
Oscar Levant was once told by a woman at a party, "There's a lot of Freud in Shakespeare." Levant replied, "There's a lot of Shakespeare in Freud."
Possibly the most astounding thing about this first novel written in 1903 and translated into English for the first time this year is the writing style with which Hesse was able to tell this tale of a young man's psychological growth. The style is every bit as developed as in his later, greater novels.
Sept. 23
1969 KANSAN 5
Minus the influence of the orient which was to affect his writing so favorably later, Hesse's use of the parable and near dialogue-less description are as precise and as extraordinary as in Steppenwolf or in Demian.
Montague ranks the Pill as a major innovation in man's history. We now can "begin the rehumanization of man at the very foundations," he believes.
But Peter Camenzind is not merely an immature edition of Hesse's greater novels. It is unique in several respects.
Here, as nowhere else, Hesse shows a sense of humor. And here, Hesse's tale of youth is much more youthful, because Hesse was young when he wrote it.
Typical of Hesse's characters, young Peter leaves home to try to answer the existential questions for himself, questions which go unasked in his home village.
Peter moves in the book from asking questions about his material life to: "What was the meaning of my life? Why had so many joys and sorrows passed over me? Why had I thirsted for the true and beautiful and why was my thirst still unquenched?"
The novel's development of a central character is inferior to that development in other Hesse novels: Siddhartha, Demian, Narcissus and Goldmund and Steppenwolf. Possibly Hesse was too young at the writing of Peter Camenzind to fully understand the psychology of maturation, an understanding he was to come by so fully and intriguingly later.
Finally, returning to his home village in the mountains, Peter's questions are concerned with how to mend the roof and whether to buy and run the town tavern.
His characters, Rosi, Boppi Richard and Signora Nardini, are fully developed in Hesse's simple writing style. They are intriguing and alive, all a part of his
From the description of his mountain village and the Fohn, turbulent season of the thaw, to his description of his aging father and uncle, Hesse demonstrates that he was an artist even as a very young man.
But Peter Camenzind is valuable as an insight into Hesse's youth. His description in this novel is at least as beautiful and perceptive as in his later novels.
The real beauty of Hesse's books, all of them, is Hesse's ability to pose questions and stimulate the mind to search for the answers.
maturation.
But that is not to say that the book lacks answers. Answers to Peter's questions emerge uniquely as truths and then fade as the circumstances of Peter's life change. Truth is constantly in flux, and no author has ever captured that fugacious aspect of truth better than Hesse.
Parents must be educated to the job of teaching their children.
Fri. & Sat. 8 p.m.
The Happy Medium
RED DOG INN
"The word of assent among the younger revolutionaries now is 'right on'. This film is right on."—D. J. Bruckner
"ABSOLUTELY MUST BE SEEN." Roger Ebert—Sun Times
Shown in its original form—16MM
AMERICAN REVOLUTION 2
"... The most important documentary of the year."
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