Word: derelicts
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WHAT HAD THEY really done to me? Nothing. There's no law against laughing at someone. In fact, it is sort of funny isn't it? A girl being chased by a derelict and defending herself! I'm laughing real hard...
...series of murders at various 18th century churches, all built by Dyer (of whom he has never heard). The superintendent plunges into an intuitive pursuit in which he begins to identify with the killer. His prime suspect, often glimpsed around the churches, is the spectral figure of a derelict with a knack for drawing. Is it the ghost of Dyer? As Hawksmoor closes in, his overstrained mind and the novel's parallel narratives dissolve into a mystical blur without quite settling the question...
...using the sound of the words to build associations and feelings, or he can tell a simple story, constantly repeating verses or choruses with his improvised country diction to make his point. He can write about the endless variations of love or about the emptiness felt inside watching a derelict die on the street. His earliest songs, many of them never recorded, are wide-eyed youthful reflections on the misfortune and injustice he saw as he journeyed through America. He writes about having no money, he writes about a Black man being lynched in the South...
...within those walls is neither didactic nor particularly political. The wry, absurdist humor recalls Beckett, and the inchoate sense of menace parallels Pinter. The candor of the final confessional between the brothers is Fugard's own. At Yale, as in the original, Fugard has directed and plays the half-derelict, fair-skinned brother. At the outset he seems fragile, ineffectual, on the border of madness. As the narrative focuses on the implications of his relative whiteness, he gathers strength and wisdom. Zakes Mokae, a 1982 Tony Award winner for Master Harold, engagingly re-creates his original performance as the darker...
...scenes on the gritty sidewalks of Manhattan allow Berger to find a more congenially savage mode, incorporating an authentic urban snarl into his impeccable diction. His hapless narrator enjoys perfect security by disguising himself as a wino ("That there is no effective form of defense against a derelict is an irreducible truth of city life"). Even the deposed Prince of Saint Sebastian hustles a string of personal appearances, with the Firm as his agent. But these passages make up a mere fraction of the book. As for the rest, one can only agree with a neighborhood hooker who unburdens herself...