Word: brilliante
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...BOTTOM LINE: A brilliant, flawed book, more stage set than novel, portrays doomed children in a dying society...
...same as being a good writer, though he is that too. His novel The Gold Bug Variations was widely praised as one of the best books of 1991. But whenever one of his narratives loses its forward motion, as happens early in this big, messy, off-and-on brilliant novel, Powers tends to go for flash. He sets off skyrockets, then more skyrockets. Great, arcing bursts of language streak across not just pages but whole chapters. (On pollution: "Maroon-brown patinas of condensing air . . . the noxious residue, the breakdown skeins of hydrocarbon linkages . . .") Then, before the afterimage can fade...
Attack ads aren't solely a Republican domain, although you'd think so, to hear the complaints of campaign reform crusaders. That's not because Democrats can't wage successful negative ad campaigns; when he ran for the Senate in '92, Minnesota Democrat Paul Wellstone launched a brilliant ad initiative against incumbent Republican Rudy Boschwitz...
There are, you might say, at least two kinds of Le Carre admirers: the official reader, who turns the pages avidly to follow the byzantine and brilliant interlacing of plots and identities and places; and the covert reader, who reads between the lines for Le Carre's searching and intense examinations into the counterfeit gentleman, and the divided heart of Englishmen. The official reader responds to the master storyteller whose narratives purr by with the smooth whoosh of a Bentley; the secret reader finds him the most interesting English novelist alive for his discussion of the quest for absolutes...
...BOTTOM LINE: Eastwood has a battle of wits with a brilliant assassin...