Word: australian
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...opening weekend included gondoliers from Venice, laser beams playing over the Empire State Building, and 1,000 schoolchildren, police and Australian lifeguards performing the whimsical A Day in the Life of Coney Island under the direction of Jacques d'Amboise. These items attracted the attention of the station-wagon set. Other performances were, aptly, more serious and even arcane...
...year is 1866, and an English governess consigned to doleful duty in a remote Australian backwater has her thoughts interrupted by a preposterous vision: "She was running through her list of unsatisfactory or irritating or boorish suitors when she saw a church made from glass towed into her field of vision by two men in wide straw hats." This is no hallucination. The crystalline minicathedral that floats into view, with a framework of iron, measures 50 ft. in length and 22 ft. 6 in. across. It weighs twelve tons...
...time the governess beholds the church, Australian Author Peter Carey's third novel has begun to build to a spectacular finish. But none of the surprises to come are any more outlandish than the trail of circumstances and coincidences that have led up to them. Like the glass structure it celebrates, Oscar and Lucinda seems the stuff of shimmering, transparent fantasy, held together by the struts of 19th century history and the mullions of painstaking detail. The book does not, of course, weigh twelve tons, but it will seem substantial enough to readers unable to put it down...
Carey's title provides an answer to the first and most obvious question: Who on earth would go to the considerable trouble of making a glass church materialize in the Australian outback? Why, Oscar and Lucinda, naturally. But who are (or were) they, what brought them together, and why did they conceive such a pointless, improbable dream? Explanations, as the author supplies them, grow ever less simple and more entertaining...
...there are some cautionary notes. Critic Robert M. Parker Jr., an early enthusiast of Australian wines, has a relatively cool appraisal of recent vintages in the February issue of his bimonthly Wine Advocate. "I must confess," he writes, "to an overall sense of disappointment with what I tasted; there were too many standard-quality, bland wines." Parker is concerned that Australia may be endangering future excellence for the sake of today's potential profits. A relatively small group of medium- and large-size firms accounts for some 90% of Australia's wine output. Until this year, many of the independent...