Word: brothel
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...First they set up a giant brothel," goes the cynical Spanish saying, "then they built Havana around...
...such nice-nellyisms as "case di tolleranza" (houses of tolerance), "case da te" (tea houses) or "persiane chiuse" (closed shutters). Last week, white-maned, octogenarian Gaetano Pieraccini lost his patience. "I am a plain doctor and a Florentine," he cried. "I call bread bread, wine wine and a brothel a brothel." No matter what they called it, Italian senators could no longer evade the issue: whether or not to close Italy's bordellos...
Like Enemy Airplanes. Bordello-keepers united against the anti-brothel bill and raised a 60 million lire ($96,000) fighting fund. In one house in Milan, any customer signing a petition against the bill was awarded one free visit. The girls and the worried madam in a swank Naples house appealed to venerable Senator Benedetto Croce, Italy's foremost philosopher, to block the bill "so that they too might have a prosperous holy year." Letters against the bill poured in on Senator Merlin, who had herself toured Rome's brothels to collect ammunition for her side...
...rifle-cracking speech sounds borrowed from George Patton; the general's rare-do-well nephew, who keeps his wife in a nervous sweat and Anna in a little apartment, and a Congressman who bellows in public to inspect the security files, and pants in private to visit a brothel...
Nevertheless, A Rage to Live is peppered with evidences of O'Hara's technical writing skill. He still has an ear for dialogue that makes his characters' conversation as credible as if it were overheard, whether they are talking in a brothel or planning a dinner at home. His gallery is extensive (housewives, doctors, politicians, businessmen, lovers, prostitutes) and the people seem as true and alive as if the reader had just met them. But Novelist O'Hara seems satisfied with only a casual-meeting knowledge of his people. Reading A Rage to Live is almost...