Word: clara
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...dragging troops in barges to England by night, Riddle's scenes carry remarkable conviction. One reason is Childers' extraordinary affection for his main characters, both the worldly Carruthers and Davies, whom Carruthers has always patronized but comes to admire. There is, of course, a damsel in distress - Clara, whose Englishness in the midst of Germans gives away the plot a bit early. But who cares? A man would have to be a brutish lout not to fall for Clara, with her "brown, firm hand - no, not so very small, my sentimental reader...
Coin flip: tails. Very well, this neurasthenic little novel is a wicked parody. It mocks the genre of relentless felicity and refined sensibility, the kind of writing in which nothing happens but much is felt. "Her heart pressed up weakly against her ribs," the reader learns of Clara, a young working woman of the kind once called "spinster." Or "Clara felt slightly breathless as though the feebleness of the light was a sign of an ever-diminishing supply of oxygen." And (Clara, in perfect health, leaving a hotel) "Clara's ankles felt weak. There seemed no way she would...
This shallow breathing occurs during a doleful evening in which Clara and three other skinless neurotics are bullied in a desultory way by a thick-skinned fifth person, Clara's frightful mother Laura. The other characters are Clara's drunken stepfather; her uncle, an exhausted, ironical pederast; and a middleaged, neuter male publisher who is a family friend. There is too much drinking, too much smoking, too much acute description of mental states. The author, unwilling to waste a scrap of anguish, views the browned-out scene through the eyes of each gloomy participant in turn. Boredom, peevishness...
...hours ago, but only Laura knows this. She refuses to tell anyone, presumably because the evening will seem even more pointless and ghastly when the truth finally is learned. "One has to take your mother seriously, but not in the usual sense," says the publisher wisely to suffering Clara. The remark fits the book itself, a strange and exasperating display of becalmed talent by the author of Desperate Characters and Poor George, novels much praised, among other things, for their "merciless observation...
...reverence for ephemeral nature in Japanese art, importing a fresh iconography of fugitive things: mist, shivering grasses, winding shoots, morning glories and insects. Nowhere is their passion for the impalpable better expressed than in the dragonfly lamp, each wing vibrating with red and amber glass, designed for Tiffany by Clara Driscoll around...