Word: drawning
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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When the friends and family make it to the funeral home they find the De Molays already arrived and the undertaker in full mourning clothes at the door, wearing his grief like a tight-fitting hat, his face pale, his eyes drawn tight almost in a squint. When people see the body they remark that the undertaker has done a good job, for you can hardly tell that Anthony had the side of his face shot away when a land mine exploded, and that the doctors in the Army surgical unit who tried to operate on the poor wounded mass...
During the thirties, Nathanael West was similarly stranded. Though the material for his four novels was drawn from the face of the Great Depression, his political intentions were never immediately explicit. To a public looking for easily digestible explanations, he was hopelessly off the ideological mark. Few writers of the thirties were as concerned with intellectual integrity, but West feared his inability to sell his books to a wide audience was an index of his failure as an artist. A socialist (for a time a communist) the polities of his writing were imbedded in the fabric of his style...
From dawn to dusk, the new hand labored in the parched and infertile fields of Dodoma, the most impoverished province of African Tanzania. Uncomplaining, he hacked at the dry soil with a primitive hoe, guided a plough drawn by oxen, picked ears of maize, ate the local diet and slept in a native hut. Julius Nyerere, 48, Tanzania's President, was making an earnest attempt to measure at first hand the depths of his country's need, and to promote Ujaama (community villages), the self-help principle through which he hopes to assist Tanzania in alleviating its poverty...
Although Home is in no danger of losing his own memories, he nevertheless takes the directive to revise the experiment as an assault on his identity. He ignores instructions, and is banished from Government service. Shortly thereafter, Black Bear escapes and defects to Russia. Home is drawn magnetically toward him and, after some uneasiness and a few pleasures, finally confronts Black Bear. What he discovers is the key to the book...
...gimmick is good enough. Alas, the characters are solid pine and the plot is upholstered with historical minutiae that quickly become tedious. Moreover, the book is illustrated with old photographs, prints and sketches supposedly drawn by the hero. Altogether a painfully literal effort, except for those who take joy in minute historical coincidence. Like the fact that New York had a ball team way back then called the Metropolitans. But those Mets had pitching problems...