In this respect the novel is for late 70s Poland what Thomas Pynchon's Vineland is for 1980s America (and both nod to Orwell's 1984): paranoid, on a tightrope between capitulation and revolt, yet somehow darkly playful, ultimately hopeful.
Later, evoking the memories of mothers caught in the worst turmoil of Somalia's conflicts, "In Love and in War" reads, "To my daughter I will say / 'when the men come, set yourself on fire.' " The collection feels confiding, occasionally brutal, but somehow still playful.
It felt somehow private, secret (playful?) as though I might just get a glimpse of invisible action when other elementals came out to play.
Playful but cynical somehow.
After that defining jump, when I finally popped my head above the water, I understood that – like those climbers who scale impossible mountains "because they're there" – this was one of those wild, existential tonics, only somehow made sweeter by its playful eccentricity.
It's revitalizing — and comforting, somehow — to revisit the sort of playful, featherbrained temperament made possible only by a decade in which prosperity and safety seemed nearly guaranteed.
Bicycle wheels dotted the landscape like trees, and the setting, somehow a mixture of icy and playful, was like an industrial forest in which you suddenly found yourself smelling with your eyes and seeing with your ears.
It is a time capsule to a bygone era that most just want gone, a place of unintentional irony, but that somehow binds a fan base and its playful, nobody-cares-but-us vibe.
To see the underlying digital structure of a single human face may be disturbing enough, but to witness the disintegration of these playful groups is to bear witness, somehow, to chaos and anomie ever pullulating beneath our well-tended pitches.
But these days, Lurie devotes himself entirely to his paintings, which somehow manage to be both colorful and dark, playful and sober, funny and reflective.
