Word: appearences
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...novel, originally published in China in 1996, is the first of Ran Chen's works to appear in English. At times her poetic style weighs down the story, but she's a seductively intimate writer and a powerful commentator on the perils of China's giddy embrace of capitalism. Chen's main character proves that it's often the most scared, the most hurt, the most rejected who can show the lemming-like masses where they're headed. And in this case, the cliff looks dangerously close. Lu Xun's madman ends his famous diary with the plea: "Save...
...find a few dolphins. Sexual tension piles up, and myriad facts about the wondrous history of the Indian swampland are learned by all. Just when you think Piya and Kanai and the silent, brooding, vaguely Conradian Fokir will wander up and down the swamp forever, tigers begin to appear along the swamp, warning you that a climax is coming; it arrives in the form of a cyclone that sweeps the archipelago and kills one of the main characters...
...motifs dominate the sophisticated but always readable layouts. The first, naturally, is that of the towers, or more specifically the orange skeleton of the north tower, seen by Spiegelman just seconds before its collapse. The image appears in every episode of "No Towers," but noticeably smaller each time. This ultra-modern, terrifying vision finds its counterpoint in the nostalgia and comfort of the series' other major motif: old newspaper comics. Explaining that these "unpretentious ephemera from the optimistic dawn of the 20th century" were "the only cultural artifacts that could get past my defenses," Spiegelman works them into the strips...
...from his subjects. He captured the pensive young girl on a balcony in The Daydream, a picture of longing, with the ray of sunlight brushing her shoulder as if singling her out. And Alvarez Bravo even managed to instill life into still life: in Laughing Mannequins, glamorous cardboard women appear smiling, while it's the real people in the image that lack life. The same is true in Cartier-Bresson's Barrio Chino, in which a smiling face chalked on the wall eclipses a spent man below. Before he died, Cartier-Bresson had a final look at his images...
...summer?s day and the spectacle of one another. What?s wrong with this picture? From a distance some of the figures have the heft and stability of Mesopotamian statuary. But step closer, and they dissolve into a force field of bristling molecules. Step back again, and they also appear like paper cutouts, flat and stiff. Are they enjoying themselves or just impersonating themselves? It won?t do to ask the monumental couple on the right - he with the cigar, she with the monkey. Like just about everyone else in this painting, both have the immobile gaze of the Sphinx...