Word: babeling
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...from Latvia, as well as about 1,200 from countries in Central America. The Multinational Division Central South will control - nominally, at least - 80,000 sq km and 3 million people in south-central Iraq. Will the force make a difference? The Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza called it "Babel in Babylon." Common military doctrine, equipment, even a shared language in this disparate "coalition of the willing" won't be possible. The numbers are a drop in the bucket compared to the 150,000 troops already deployed by the Americans, and don't pack the wallop of the 10,500 British...
...popularity of Six Feet Under, the HBO series about a family of undertakers, and the success of novels like The Lovely Bones, about a dead girl who watches her family from heaven, and this summer's The Dogs of Babel, in which an artist makes fanciful death masks, have helped give people new ways to look at death. Recent waves of immigrants have also made people more comfortable with diverse funeral customs. But it's the demographic might of the baby boomers, finally coming to terms with their mortality, that has sent the $17 billion funeral and cemetery industry scrambling...
...would be unfair to compare 88's The Dogs of Babel (Little, Brown; 264 pages) to The Lovely Bones--but it is tempting. Both are by women, both first-time novelists, both from the same publisher. The Dogs of Babel arrives almost exactly a year after The Lovely Bones and with some of the same buzz--both scored Anna Quindlen's coveted endorsement, for example. But while The Dogs of Babel has many of the virtues of its predecessor and will no doubt please many of the same readers, it won't please them quite as much...
...Dogs of Babel begins with a death (just like--to belabor the point--The Lovely Bones). Paul Iverson, a 44-year-old linguistics professor, comes home to find that his wife Lexy has fallen from the apple tree in her backyard. Or jumped--he can't tell, and the only witness to her fall is a dog, a large, affectionate Rhodesian Ridgeback named Lorelei. Paul becomes obsessed with finding out how his wife died. He sets out to teach Lorelei to talk so she can tell...
...Dogs of Babel is a neatly, almost perfectly constructed novel, but its flawlessness is also its biggest flaw. It's too pretty: it lacks the messiness of reality, and as a result it feels smaller than life, like a nifty short story spun out to feature length, a tragedy staged in a shoebox. It's the difference between cute and beautiful. What The Dogs of Babel lacks is the raw, sobbing rage that powered The Lovely Bones, that left it with ragged edges, that made it howl and that made it great--and that left readers, reviewers and editors alike...