Word: dissimilarly
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...Woiwode's concerns. He subtitles this novel A Family Chronicle, and the description is apt. The book's rhythm is not that of cinema but of still life. Woiwode scatters memorabilia of the Neumiller clan through 44 separate stories, some of which have appeared alone in such dissimilar magazines as The New Yorker and Mademoiselle. Most of the tales are inventories of nostalgia-the humble detritus of people who, in George Eliot's phrase, "lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs." With rare patience and self-evident love, Woiwode commemorates the commonplace...
...human knowledge; another is an improbably tangled set of rules or bylaws; and the third is a sort of portrait gallery, with literally hundreds of faces staring off its pages. For all their diversity--and it is hard to imagine how three literary works could be more generically dissimilar--Courses of Instruction, Rules Relating and the Freshman Register share an odd way of looking at what is, after all, a very real Harvard College. They are unevenly illuminated, often fragmentary and obscure, always episodic and conventionalized--they exemplify perfectly, Auerbach would say, representational techniques perfected for the first and last...
...Calvino's novel of parables. Eudoxia is a city seemingly without form, but whose true shape is preserved in a certain intricately woven carpet, just as Calvino's empire preserves some semblance of our own. According to an oracle, "questioned about the mysterious bond between two objects so dissimilar as the carpet and the city," one has a god-given form, and the other is "an approximate reflection, like every human creation...
...HUMAN EQUALITY. The difference of natural talents in different men is, in reality, much less than we are aware of . . . The difference between the most dissimilar characters, between a philosopher and a common street porter, for example, seems to arise not so much from nature, as from habit, custom and education...
Unglossed with second thoughts or self-justifications, Wilson's impressions sometimes recall the heartless mirth of an otherwise very dissimilar writer of the period, Evelyn Waugh. If friends got divorced, or somebody disappeared, or a girl slit her wrist with the top of a spaghetti can-well, the other revelers could not pause too long over the misfortune lest they lose their grip and go under too. Wilson himself almost did. In 1929 he suffered a nervous breakdown, probably from the cumulative strain of deadlines and tangled romances. While in the sanitorium he became addicted briefly to the drug...