Word: chaplinitis
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...CHARLIE CHAPLIN AND OONA O'NEILL He was 54; she was 18 But: two of his previous brides were even younger...
...embodiment of pure intellect, the bumbling professor with the German accent, a comic cliche in a thousand films. Instantly recognizable, like Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp, Albert Einstein's shaggy-haired visage was as familiar to ordinary people as to the matrons who fluttered about him in salons from Berlin to Hollywood. Yet he was unfathomably profound--the genius among geniuses who discovered, merely by thinking about it, that the universe was not as it seemed...
...tale is this: in middle age Chaplin, a journalist, and Susan Atkinson, a nurse married to Chaplin's college roommate, embark upon "an illicit, dangerous romance." In 1989, after years of landlocked child-rearing (four daughters between them), they leave their marriages and decide, like the owl and the pussycat, to set off to sea in the 36-ft. double-ended motor-sailor Lord Jim. Throughout the chronicle blow dark gusts of both families' anger and disapproval--bad emotional weather that is the underlying motif of Chaplin's memoir, even when tropical sun shines on the romantic fugitives...
...While Chaplin and Atkinson are anchored at Wotho, an obscure spot in the Marshall Islands, Typhoon Gay roars in. There is sanctuary ashore in the island's church, which is strong enough to withstand the wind. The couple decide to stay onboard to try to ride out the storm at anchor. Not smart. The typhoon makes directly for Wotho Island, rips loose Lord Jim and its middle-aged lovers (who have not even got their life jackets inflated and strapped on properly). The typhoon beats the boat to pieces on the coral. It tears Susan from the feckless Gordon...
Dark Wind, a heartbreaking, infuriating book, draws its narrative power from the reader's ambivalence about whether to weep with Chaplin or break his neck...