Word: clara
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...There's Clara, the dog who wears vintage dresses and gets all her information from The Daily Show. And Bailey, the gray cat who will bore you with lectures about why he feels Fellini's 8½ is superior to La Dolce Vita. Cosmo regrets hooking up with someone at Bonnaroo, and Daisy is on Day 5 of the "master cleanse...
...edge of a precipice. For Proust, that loss surrounds mortality and the desire to mentally ward it off at all costs; for the narrator, it is simply a question of “lying low” and warding off the cruelty of lovers. Yet the protagonist and Clara, caught in their self-involved and unspectacular web of emotions, are too banal for Aciman’s trick to work, and the protagonist’s dense, slogging thoughts form a thicket of angst that paralyses the narrative. He despairingly thinks, “It occurred to me that rehearsing...
...only dynamic motif in “Eight White Nights” is the coded language that the lovers invent in order to communicate with each other. One of Aciman’s more inspired devices, it infuses the relationship between Clara and the protagonist with the warmth and poignancy of two kindred spirits attempting to invent a hermetic universe for themselves. They invent the terms “otherpeoples” and “Shukoffs” in their very first conversation, referring to the mass of boring, unimaginative humans who surround them. Their conversation continues, full...
...order to give context to the disembodied desire of his two lovers, Aciman references a bygone European past, but manages to trivialize it by reducing it to a simple, romantic picture of the Old Country. Both Clara and the protagonist come from an Eastern European, Jewish background and move about in a world with scattered references to Dostoevsky, Rilke, Rohmer, St. Petersburg, Bellagio and Byzantium—one that is faded around the edges like a sepia photograph...
...just Aciman’s projection of how he believes women want men to think, feel and obsess over them, since there doesn’t appear to be much emotional impetus for the narrator to act on beyond the overwhelming longing and fear he feels for Clara. Ultimately, “Eight White Nights” is too artificial on all its fronts to fulfill Aciman’s ambition of creating an evocative, transcending love story...