Word: characterize
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
“Ergo” is the story of three men—the widower Wacholder, his stepson Aslan, and the tenant Leo—living at “Custom House No. 8,” a dilapidated lodgment by an unnamed river. Much of the plot is...
In the end, however, “Ergo” is obnoxiously one-dimensional. Of course there are many abstract ideas presented in the book, but they all serve a single purpose: existential terror. The novel explores no other sentiment. Even the intercourse of Wacholder and Trude Böckling...
Lind’s language is vulgar, again without variation. Toward the end of the book, Leo says, “We pull on God’s cock therefore, we are. Penem Dei tractamus ergo sumus.” This declaration is presumably an important sentence, considering the fact...
But Pamuk avoids claustrophobia by elevating his repetitions into a self-referential body of work as complex as that of Nabokov, Barth, or Bolaño. Just as with those writers, the relationship between author and fiction remains intriguingly fluid. Many of Pamuk’s fictional landmarks are recognizable...
These days, Roth is about as prolific as he is grim. His most recent novels have all dealt in almost expository detail with the subject of death and its inextricability from the spectrum of human experience. “The Humbling,” with its three-act structure and...