Talk:The Manchurian Candidate

Pages references, quotes, info, etc., from the book, to incorporate into the article eventually

I'm using this space as a Sandbox for the development of the article. Please feel free to start new discussion sections below my last edit. Eventually all of this stuff will disappear as I use it in the article.

Anent: Raymond Shaw:

• "The sergeant's rage-daubed face would shine like a ripped-out heart flung onto stones in the moonlight" -- page 30

• "The sergeant's account of his past was ancient in its form and confusingly dramatic, as perhaps would have been a game of three-level chess between Richard Burbage and Sacha Guidy." -- page 31

• "...large glaucous eyes with very large whites, like those of a carousel horse pursued by the Erinyes, those female avengers of antiquity." -- page 32

• "It was not that Raymond was hard to like. He was impossible to like." -- page 33

• "His pose, had it been executed in oils, might have been called "The Young Duke among the Fishmongers." -- page 47

• Anent Marco: "He had the superior digestive system which affords almost every man blessed with it the repose to become thoughtful." -- page 35

• Anent a Russian general: "[he was]... as stocky as an opera hat." -- page 43

• Marco's squad members, all of whom, except Marco and Raymond, are named after actors in the Bilko show: "Between them, left to right, were Hiken, Grosfield, Little, Silvers, Mavole, Melvin, Freeman, Lembeck." -- page 46

• "Their brains had not merely been washed, they had been dry-cleaned." -- page 64

• Anent Medal of Honor winners, "when he reaches the age of sixty-five he becomes eligible to receive a pension of $120 per year from which, if he smokes one package of cigarettes a day, he would have $11.85 left over for rent, food, hospitalization, entertainment, education, recreation, philanthropies, and clothing." (Cigarettes would be 29 cents a pack....) -- page 67

• "Raymond's mother was dressed up to about eight hundred dollars' worth of the best taste on the market. The only jarring note ws the enormous black purse she carried. It looked like a purse. It was a portable cigar humidor. The would have given the press people money, Raymond knew, but she had sensed somehow that it would be misunderstood." -- page 69

• "the pupils of his eyes were open at about f.09 with the sedation she had loaded into him." -- page 70

• "found himself as impotent as a male butterfly atop a female pterodactyl when he tried to have commerce with Raymond's mother." -- page 81

• "The governor never shaved from Friday night to Monday morning, no matter what function might be scheduled, as though he were a part-time Sikh." -- page 102

• "Only twice was there a time when he did not maintain the full and automatic three-hundred-and-sixty-degree horizon of raw sensibilities over which swept the three searing beams of suspicion, fear, and resentment flashing from the loneliness of the tall lighthouse of his soul." -- page 112

• "...straightening her back and slipping several lengths of steel into her voice like whalebone into a corset." -- page 158.

• "Every nerve end in his body had grown a small ticklish mustache, and they sidled along under his skin like eager touts, screaming on tiptoe." -- page 181

• Raymond's mother in a fancy French restaurant: "I ask you to imagine a restaurant... which does not list Clos de Lambrays or a Cuvée Docteur Peste!" -- page 211

• "...a young, dumpy blonde with a face like a bat's and the thirst of a burning oil field." -- page 274

• "...an utterly new conception, perhaps as television would have been to the inventor of the wheel." -- page 287

Charge of plagarism from "I, Claudius"

hmmm, seems pretty well-founded. See: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/10/04/DD13399.DTL Quel deception! Hayford Peirce 21:09, 15 August 2009 (UTC)

references to the Condon cult

• as late as the 1969 NYT review of Mile High at http://select.nytimes.com/mem/archive/pdf?res=F0081EFB3A5910738DDDA80B94D0405B898AF1D3

• even later, in 1974, in NYT review of Winter Kills at http://select.nytimes.com/mem/archive/pdf?res=FB0B17FD3A5F107A93C4AB178ED85F408785F9

• The Detroit Free Press for Any God Will Do at http://www.paperbackswap.com/book/details/198370-Any+God+Will+Do, a secondary source

text from sources for Critical Reception

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,825787,00.html

July 6, 1959

Books: Pantless at Armageddon

The cultural handicappers who tick off lists of the Ten Best Books To Be Stranded in Toledo With have missed a bet. Far more interesting might be a compilation of the Ten Best Bad Novels-books whose artistic flaws are mountainous but whose merits, like Loreleis on the rocks above, keep on luring readers. A place on such a list would go to Author Condon's second novel, an almost complete catalogue of humanity's disorders, including incest, dope addiction, war, politics, brainwashing and multiple murder. The book carries a superstructure of plot that would capsize Hawaii, and badly insufficient philosophical ballast. Yet Condon distributes his sour, malicious humor with such vigor and impartiality that the novel is certain to be read and enjoyed.

The Pavlov Route. Man's fate, as Condon sees it, is to work hard, sacrifice much, lead an intelligent, just and fruitful life, and then show up at the Last Judgment minus his pants. Sooner or "later, like the blind beggars toppling after their blind leader in Bruegel's chillingly ironic painting, all the author's characters stumble into the ditch of mortality. Satirist Condon is not afraid to set up outrageously improbable situations to achieve his effects. In his first novel, The Oldest Confession (1958), an Achilles among criminals was brought to heel while trying to hijack Goya's The Second of May, from the Prado. In the current fable, a brilliant Chinese disciple of Pavlov—a sort of Marxist Dr. Fu Manchu—directs the capture, brainwashing and reflex-conditioning of an entire American patrol during the Korean war. Before grinning Russian brasshats, he shows off his success. The Americans puff contentedly on yak dung cigarettes and delicately avoid G.I. profanity—they imagine they are attending a meeting of the garden club in Spring Valley, N.J. They are so thoroughly Pavloved, in fact, that they are ready to commit murder on signal.

The soldiers are turned loose, each carefully convinced by the brain-conditioner that his unit has wiped out an entire company of Chinese, largely thanks to the efforts of a tall, dour sergeant. The leader of the patrol recommends the sergeant for the Medal of Honor, and he returns to the U.S. amid press-led drums and bugles, unaware that he is a walking time bomb conditioned to murder at the command of a Stateside operator.

Oedipal Wreck. Ensuing events follow each other to confusion like derailed freight cars. They involve the sergeant's stepfather, a Senator who trades on his war wound and resembles McCarthy as played by Lou Costello, and his mother, a megalomaniac who maneuvers the Senator like a windup toy and makes an Oedipal wreck of her son.

In the end. the effort at global satire proves too strenuous. In spite of a climax as apocalyptic as any since King Kong was shot off the top of the Empire State Building, Author Condon falters as he battles both cold-war antagonists simultaneously. But in his comic set pieces, he is wickedly skillful. The book's most memorable incident reveals the true story of the Senator's battle scar. Stationed in Greenland, far from the smell of gunpowder but also far from any American women, the legislator-to-be seeks out the sealskinned houris of an Eskimo camp. A fight starts, and an impassioned maiden, fearful of not getting her share, gnaws him lustfully on the foot. "I guess that's the end of the war for old Johnny," says a buddy. But the future Senator has just begun to fight.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,825787-2,00.html#ixzz0b79thzR4

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,825787,00.html#ixzz0b79jP1P9

NYT review of April 26, 1959, by Frederic Morton, "One Thing Led to Another" at http://select.nytimes.com/mem/archive/pdf?res=F50B14F9355C1A7B93C4AB178FD85F4D8585F9

Richard Condon has found an original way of avoiding the second-novel problem.... he comes up, simultaneously as it were, with his second, third and fourth volumns. Within two covers he compresses (1) a breathlessly up-to-date thriller, gimmicked to the gills, from judo to narco-hypnosis: (b) a psychoanalytic horror tale about (what else?) a mother and a son: and (c) an irate sociopolitical satire that tries to flay our sibboleths alive.

...blinding thrust-and-parry between F.B.I. and Soviet Secret Police. Plot tumbles upon counterplot. Agatha Christie takes over from Damon Runyon and Sigmund Freud. The good guys win in the end -- except that suddenly Freud reappears: "What is good?"

Mr. Condon has not written a successful novel, but a wild, vigorous, curiously readable melange.