Abstract

Cultcrazy
Disch, Thomas M. | November 30, 1985 issue

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The article focuses on the book "Masters of Atlantis," by Charles Portis. It is a hilarious and good-natured account of intellectual and spiritual aspiration at the intellectual and dumb peoples' buffoonish nadir. The story begins in Chaumont in 1917, when for a mere $200 a gypsy sells to a Candide-like American doughboy, Lamar Jimmerson, the manuscript, handwritten in Greek. There is not a chapter of the twenty-four without its bounty of good jokes, all framed on the ageless opposition between quixotic self-deception and public perception. Portis, like Dickens, takes an unashamed delight in grotesquery and freakishness and in the intractableness of stupidity, as though it were a prodigious weed to be marveled at.

See Also:

MASTERS of Atlantis (Book); PORTIS, Charles; SPIRITUALITY; INTELLECT; WIT & humor; STUPIDITY
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