Word: cousin
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...beginning to West's posthumous career, smoothly bridging past and future. The novel is a sequel to The Fountain Overflows (1956), the chronicle of a shabby-genteel family in turn-of-the-century London. A third volume, to be published later, will complete the trilogy West planned to call Cousin Rosamund: A Saga of the Century. The subtitle radiates the same kind of old-fashioned hubris that led Wells to write The Outline of History; the continuation of West's saga shows how thoroughly her grasp matched her reach...
...Rose, the narrator, says, that "to play an instrument badly was as shameful as any crime short of murder." Rose and her twin sister Mary practice the piano daily and dream of their futures on concert stages across Europe. The precocious little brother, Richard Quin, grows more charming, while Cousin Rosamund, withdrawn and beautiful, becomes effectively a member of this fatherless family...
...earth she regards as equals. These include most of the Benoirs, an impossibly rich and haughty French clan whose members call themselves the Sioux, perhaps as a tribute to their own ferocity. Mim, in her mid-20s, has led a luxurious but troubled life. Her first marriage, to Cousin Georges Benoir, ended in a car crash that killed one of the world's most dashing multimillionaires and the father of her son. Her second union, to a Governor of Mississippi named Davis Davis, proved a three-month debacle. Her honeymoon with Castleton has been acceptable; now she anxiously awaits...
Young Georges-Marie, 9, has, as his cousin Bienville tartly notes, "more names than Jehovah," among them Moumou, Puss and the Dauphin. This spectrally beautiful, thin, pale child speaks a bewildering mixture of French and "Ol' Kintuck," the hayseed dialect he absorbed during his brief exposure to Governor Davis' three strapping sons: "O, he jest being plain bad. O, il m'echappe toujours!" All the Sioux are holding their breath to see how George takes to Castleton. Armand reassures his brother-in-law: "The Dauphin has a truly terrifying sense of gratitude. You'll be annihilated by it, my poor...
...search for self. That quest, and the thoughts it inspires, brings as much pain as enlightenment. In a typical passage, Heaney, who grew up in Northern Ireland, bitterly remembers the Catholic ghetto, and "how quick I was to know my place." In another, he faces the ghost of his cousin Colum, killed in the sectarian violence. "You confused evasion and artistic tact," the murdered man tells him. "The Protestant who shot me through the head/ I accuse directly, but indirectly, you . . . for the way you whitewashed ugliness and drew/ the lovely blinds of the Purgatorio/ and saccharined my death with...