Word: beare
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...story that Irving folded into the heart of Garp. That work tells of a father who takes his family to stay in a seedy Viennese hotel. It is home to a rundown Hungarian circus whose members include a shinless man who walks only on his hands and a depressed bear on a unicycle...
...Berry. The charming troublemaker begins his career on the New England coast with the purchase of an aging trained bear called State O' Maine and a 1937 Indian motorcycle with sidecar. The seller is a vagabond named Freud, who after World War II lures Win into the Viennese hotel deal. The hapless entrepreneur is blinded by a radical's bomb and winds up at the third Hotel New Hampshire, in Maine, bought by his surviving children. Only the children do not have the heart to tell him that the resort has been turned into a rape crisis center...
...preparation for life is largely symbolic; as a jogger and weight lifter, he has the strength and endurance to repel invaders and shoulder his relatives' burdens. Characteristically, he marries the most imaginatively troubled woman in the book, a rape victim who spends many angry years in a bear suit as a bouncer at a brothel...
Europe offered Irving a large slice of the bohemian life. He explored by car and motorcycle, met painters and poets, worked out in gyms with burly grapplers who grunted in Slavic. He also met a man with an old trained bear, an animal that would prowl his future books...
...Irving bear is a pathetic creature whose strength and dignity are ridiculed by its overriding need to perform. Explains the author: "They have become good at learning tricks to amuse people, but they have been reduced to a shadow show, like so many people who have been taught the most arduous skills that most of us find silly-like writing, reading and even wrestling...