Word: dickensians
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Saki was born into a Scottish family with a strong martial tradition and brought up in darkest Devon by a pair of truly Dickensian aunts before escaping to boarding school ("You can't expect a boy to be vicious until he's been to a good school"). He was homosexual, but neither Saki nor Langguth goes in for soul searching about the love that once dared not speak its name. Saki, in fact, never mentioned it. His sister merely refers to his habit of sharing digs with young men as "chumming." In the biographer's view, however...
Like Garp, the new book is a startlingly original family saga that combines macabre humor with Dickensian sentiment and outrage at cruelty, dogmatism and injustice. Unlike Garp, Hotel aggressively links realism with the tone and symbolism of fable. Imagine a fairy tale dealing explicitly with rape, incest, prostitution and terrorism. Imagine the Brothers Grimm without the dense mythological overlay...
Antonia White worked as a journalist and as a translator from the French. She wrote three more autobiographical books, which follow her heroine, now called Clara Batchelor, until she is 23. The Lost Traveller centers on her intense relation with her adoring but autocratic father. If Claude Batchelor lacks Dickensian vitality, he is drawn with a similar range of contradictory, deeply human strengths and weaknesses. The Sugar House and Beyond the Glass, covering a disastrous marriage and an emotional breakdown (which White also suffered), are less effective, but reflect the accuracy and honesty of the author's eye. White...
...that most workers find their labor mechanical, boring, imprisoning, stultifying, repetitive, dreary, heartbreaking. In his 1972 book Working, Studs Terkel began: "This book, being about work, is, by its very nature, about violence-to the spirit as well as to the body." The historical horrors of industrialization (child labor, Dickensian squalor, the dark satanic mills) translate into the 20th century's robotic busywork on the line, tightening the same damned screw on the Camaro's firewall assembly, going nuts to the banging, jangling Chaplinesque whirr of modern materialism in labor, bringing forth issue, disgorging itself upon the market...
...week as people tried to buy scarce delicacies for the year-end holidays. In every city, town and hamlet, citizens stood in line in hopes of getting a carp for the traditional Polish Christmas Eve dinner. When available, the fish cost $1.22 a pound. In downtown Warsaw, as a Dickensian gloom settled over the capital one evening, more than 70 people queued up before a seedy, barren-looking candy store in hopes of buying chocolates for their children. The shortages are worse than usual these days, because of hoarding inspired by Solidarity's strike threats last month. "People...