Word: eller
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Total Record. The novel deals with a Paris high school teacher, Pierre Vernier, who keeps a minute-by-minute log of all that happens in his eleventh-grade geography class in which his nephew Pierre Eller is a student. Vernier is obsessed by the need to record the total experience: This drives him to include, first, accounts of other students and teachers, then of their families and friends, then of their past and future lives. Next, the compulsive Vernier must procure the manuals and textbooks for all the courses these students are taking, to bone up on them...
...ELLER...
...minute garden patches and chicken yards that speckle a Trieste hillside. Well armed with the tools of the surveyor's profession, a detachment of the border commission in charge of dividing Trieste between Italy and Yugoslavia arrived one day last week at the two-acre plot of Luca Eller, a 65-year-old farmer of Italian extraction. The commissioners discovered that the line laid out in the Trieste agreement would cut directly through the trim, two-story red house where Eller lived with his wife, his two sons and his two grandchildren...
...Yugoslavs on the mixed commission (made up of Yugoslavs, Americans, Britons and some Italian observers) promptly suggested that the line be bent to put the entire Eller farm in Yugoslavia. While a large crowd of kibitzing Italian and Yugoslav peasants looked on, the line-drawers argued it out. The U.S. senior officer present, Major William Grower, disagreed with the Yugoslavs. He suggested that since the Ellers were Italians the line should be bent to put the farm entirely in Italy. The Yugoslavs refused. After two frustrating hours, Grower ordered a stake driven near the wall of Eller's house...
Seven Brothers. The commissioners moved on, and friends comforted distraught Luca Eller with assurances that the border was still only provisional and might yet be rectified with small adjustments. (As a matter of fact, the agreement specifically provides against cutting houses in two.) Meanwhile, Luca Eller and family sadly set to moving as much furniture as they could into the Italian side of their internationalized farm house...