Word: deviled
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Perhaps the most moving story--and the most delightful--is the first one, "A Jew of Persia," where the folktale situation of a woodsman's encounter with the Devil is firmly set into twentieth-century Israel. When the situation is reversed and he is writing about everyday America, Helprin often feels compelled to use style and language to give his story an exotic strain. Helprin is not unique in his desire to blend the old and the new--he is following such writers as John Fowles and Isaac Bashevis Singer--but he has managed, through the juxtaposition of form...
...folks home while the government ponders what to do with him. The psychiatrists are baffled and so are the official interrogators, who seem gradually reduced to bullies out to crack a 90-year-old man. Hamsun remains impervious. He is possessed by neither God nor the devil and certainly not by Hitler, whom he disliked, but apparently by a fiercely primitive individuality that remains unyielding to all external forces, including the government of Norway. It is one of Dorst's achievements that a thousand questions about the debts owed by the citizen to the state and vice versa press...
...every day. They watched her pass by every day for two years, all wanting to ask her name, or ask her out, but none of them ever got up the nerve. Then she moved away. For an encore, Springsteen did a medley of old rock and roll tunes, including "Devil with the blue dress on", and, in keeping with the season, a cutesy Fifties rock version of "Santa Claus is coming to town." Also as an encore, Springsteen played a romantic, lyrical version of "For You," from his first album, accompanied only by his own piano playing, perhaps to prove...
...becomes dismayingly obvious before The Devil Is a Woman gets too far along that Director Damiano Damiani intends yet another anticlerical tract, with healthy doses of lubricity included to get the unconverted over the rough parts. Assignations are revealed, suicides initiated and plots thickened. One resident spills out a tale of hot romance with his sister. His parents did not approve and shipped him off to the hostel for safekeeping. Jackson finds religious relief- and, one supposes, some measure of sexual satisfaction - by strapping a belt of thorns around her waist very tightly. The collaborationist priest craves extra desserts...
...from the Jackson regime, and other residents of the hostel defect as well. But none can live without the church's comforting repression. All find their way back there quite soon, except the journalist, the eternal skeptic, who just has a good laugh about the whole thing. The Devil Is a Woman, however, makes a pretty flat cosmic joke...