Word: divinas
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Despite the book's intellectual challenges, Divina Trace should hold readers' interest throughout. Divina Trace contains so much literary complexity--numerous, seemingly disparate themes; varied, contradictory voices and perspective; and a hopelessly confusing chronology--that Robert Antoni's ability to keep it from sinking is quite an accomplishment. He succeeds in forging an enthralling novel out of what could have become a literary disaster...
...Have no doubt about who you are," Maria Callas once counseled a student soprano. La Divina, as she was called, was talking about the art of portraying an operatic heroine onstage. But she might have been offering her philosophy of life. She came out of an unhappy childhood-appallingly fat and resentful and lonely-and clawed her way to success and greatness with a singlehearted ferocity that awed even her enemies. Conductor Tullio Serafin, her indispensable mentor in the crucial early days, was tossed aside temporarily-for daring to record La Traviata with another soprano. Enraged at the Callas...
...sees some negative consequences: "a certain flattening of personality" and perhaps "a stunting effect on creativity, devotion, courage and similar forms of transcendence. Has it not been said that if Dante had married Beatrice, we would not have had the Divina Commedia...
...early fifties, already sees the world divided between an innocent proletariat (an urbanized "noble savage") and an evil, decadent bourgeoisie. His prose development follows a similar pattern; a growing rigidity of perception is apparent when one compares "Ragazzi di vita" (also written in the fifties) to "La Divina Mimesis," a parody of the Divine Comedy he was working on at his death. Pasolini always wrote in parables, but in his later work his symbols become estranged from any reality. "The Divine Mimesis" is full of wornout catchphrases of the Italian left; the souls Pasolini-Dante meets in his Inferno...
...restaurant in the Bois de Boulogne-who could resist the combination? Certainly not Maria Meneghini Callas, 40, or maybe it was Metropolitan Opera Manager Rudolf Bing, 62, who proved only human after all. At any rate, the two kissed and made up in Paris in June, and La Divina will return to the Met for Tosca next year, her first New York appearance since Bing fired her for breaking an engagement...