Word: castaway
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Following the intricate expansiveness of her much praised novel Machine Dreams, the gifted Phillips, 35, has here assembled a collection of loose ends: first-person monologues revolving around barefoot girls, post-hippie gypsies and other street-smart naifs. One story is a kelped and matted address delivered by a castaway young woman to the baby inside her; another, the erotically charged rural reminiscence of an old lady; a third, the juiced-up riff of a 20-year-old rock 'n' roller, strutting his stuff with the swagger of the vulnerable...
Robinson Crusoe, apotheosis of the desert island castaway, throws one of the longest shadows in literature. For more than two centuries, he and his black companion Friday have provoked countless imitations, parodies, cartoons and advertisements. But from the earliest days, in addition to the parasol and firearm, the beachcombers have also carried some heavy moral baggage. Rousseau considered Daniel Defoe's 1719 novel vital to the education of ambitious youth; Coleridge regarded Crusoe as the "universal representative"; and Karl Marx found the plot an illustration of basic economics...
When their grandmother dies, care of the castaway daughters eventually falls to their Aunt Sylvie, who comes back to Fingerbone from whereabouts and husband unknown. She is a gentle, oddly weatherless woman who poses no threat in the way of harshness or undue discipline. The girls like her, and worry: "Lucille and I still doubted that Sylvie would stay. She resembled our mother, and besides that, she seldom removed her coat, and every story she told had to do with a train or a bus station." The three settle into a land of amiable anarchy. They eat what and when...
...form of a review of a nonexistent book. Lem, of course, is both reviewer and conceiver of the unwritten texts. Some are fairly straightforward social and literary satires. Les Robinsonades dismisses Defoe's Robinson Crusoe as a puritanized fiction based on a brutish factual account of a castaway (which it was), and presents a New Robinson who is not nostalgic for a lost culture. He re-creates his world from scratch, dreaming into being a manservant named Snibbins and a three-legged female companion called Wendy Mae. The course of true creation never runs smoothly. "Thus the logically perfect...
Lange benefits from some of Semple's best lines. Unlike Fay Wray in the original, who was mostly called upon to scream and faint, Lange plays a sexually hip chick, a movie starlet who literally drifts into the picture as a castaway from a wrecked yacht on which she was cruising with a movie producer who had promised her a part. Once she gets over the shock of Kong's first spectacular pickup, she treats him like all the apelike movie moguls she has had to fend off. She tries helplessness ("I can't stand heights"), anger...