Word: alter-ego
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Taking place in Rabagliati's native Quebec during the heyday of Queen and Supertramp, "Summer Job" begins with Paul, the author's alter-ego, having just quit school and suffering the tedium of working at a printing press. Artistically inclined, he had acquired a government grant to paint murals on the school walls, but a ruthless principal pulled him off the job due to low marks. Bored, directionless and angry, the last stroke comes when Paul's pet bird dies. Luckily an acquaintance calls to offer Paul a job as a counselor at a woodsy camp for underprivileged children...
...section of "Voyage," Scorsese says this about women in the world of Fellini and his alter-ego hero, the movie director Guido: "He can love them, he can use them, he can ignore or worship them. But he can't control them." This is a sharp observation, but not quite so passionately expressed as his remarks about Guido's difficulty in getting his next film started - the subject of "8-1/2": "In order to make the movie you want to make, you need time. But that's the hardest thing to find when you're a filmmaker." Scorsese...
...earlier stories Abe has a superhero alter-ego, Captain Oblivion, who foils evil plots like the distribution of "blinkers," a device that allows the wearer to "stick ruthlessly to one narrow path in life." But by midway through the book both Capt. "O" and the futuristic setting recede in favor of meditative free-association comix and thoughtful travelogues. One of the pleasures of reading the book is in watching how the artist evolves from creating whimsical spoofs with a touch of poetic consciousness to the exact inverse of that...
...York is the most immediately obvious change from Rushdie’s previous works. Malik Solanka, the novel’s protagonist, has, like Rushdie, recently relocated to New York after many years’ residence in England. It rapidly becomes clear that Solanka is an unashamed alter-ego to Rushdie; both have been married twice, both attended Cambridge, both were born in Bombay. It is not unreasonable to assume that the fury of the title, a fury with the ever increasing pace and inhumanity of modern life and the pain of loss, has been shared by both...
Rushdie has been accused of drawing his female characters in less than three dimension, and it is difficult to dismiss the allegation in this book. The book is dedicated to Rushdie’s new partner, and it largely turns on her fictional alter-ego, Neela, the woman who finally manages to rescue Solanka from his fury. Yet there is something unsatisfying in her portrayal. She is characterized in terms of her beauty, which Rushdie is forced to describe in terms of its (hazardous) effects on her surroundings: arrested traffic, collisions with lamp posts and occasional tears. But the reader...