Word: brutally
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...pauper of 1988, Babbitt has little to lose, so he can risk everything. He is betting that his brutal honesty about cutting the federal deficit -- by raising taxes and slashing middle-class entitlements -- will garner attention. It is the only strategy he can afford...
...reader's sympathy swings against Mgungu early on in the novel. At one point, he describes himself as "A brutal and violently ignorant savage, though charming in a primitive way, who was fleeing his wives and 13 children for the charms of a young American, possibly even the Hamptons and the New York Film Festival if everything went well and I played my cards right." This is meant to be satirical, I suppose, but it's so clumsily executed and so misses its easy targets that one really can't be sure...
From these exercises, scraps of long-forgotten incidents start to emerge from the thickets of memory: eating tomatoes and then being screamed at by a shrewish mother; a father's leaving home; an overheard neighbors' conversation about a brutal father; being rejected by schoolmates. Hal (all patients' names . in this article are fictitious) is responding quickly to Bergman's constant probing and badgering. "It's like a crash course in therapy -- the emotions come up so quickly," he says. "At the same time, you know you're safe because it's only a play...
When the sun sets on an empire, who will turn on the lamplights? Or will the fading sky be illuminated by the torches of revolution and anarchy? In South Africa, white rulers desperately hold back the dusk with brutal measures that amount to the imposition of triple daylight saving time. But they can't hold back the clock; night and a new, black dawn are surely imminent. In Britain the empire has collapsed upon itself. A long generation ago the colonists came home, followed by their colonials -- dark skins, quick minds and rebellious hearts from the East and West Indies...
...clear? No? Don't worry; these lives are not meant to be sorted out. Like real relationships, they are messy, incendiary, lingering past the pleasure point. Kureishi's women can be doctrinaire or maternal or game for a good time; his men, the "unfair sex," can be docile or brutal or just led by their lust. Poor randy Sammy, slave to the priapic imperative: "I'm like a little man being pulled around...