Word: elsa
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Victor is a 44-year-old antique dealer, newly escaped from a dull marriage and a dull office job. Elsa is 19 and his mistress. "A year ago, when Victor was still a tax accountant, he fished Elsa out of his typists' pool. She flapped and wriggled a little, and then lay still, legs gently parted." This plummy pair is to spend the weekend cataloguing marketable monstrosities at the mansion of Hamish, an elderly millionaire, and his beautiful, young, crippled wife Gemma...
...with Gemma that naughtiness enters the picture. She has cooked up a scheme-unnecessarily devious, since no one seriously opposes it-for Hamish to lie with Elsa, who will then hatch out the child that she, Gemma, wants but cannot give birth to. She herself, more to serve iniquity than to requite passion, will bed with Victor. "Love," she tells Elsa, is "gene calling to gene, as country cats call to each other across fields...
...genes busily at work, all would seem to be well with the author's warm-weather fiction. But Novelist Weldon is much too fond of the kind of ornateness that clutters Iris Murdoch's lesser novels-in this case, the ponderous idea that Hamish is Rumpelstiltskin and Elsa is the poor girl for whom he spins straw into gold. Gemma insists that Elsa do huge batches of typing each night. Elsa can't manage it, but Hamish...
Will to Live. Against all such trends, Italian Author Elsa Morante, 65, has turned out a supremely unfashionable book. History: A Novel is a long, slow read. It is almost entirely lacking in sex or suspense; when characters are doomed, Morante sounds a warning well in advance of the event. The novel's main figures-Ida Mancuso, a widowed Roman schoolteacher, and her two sons -are neither witty nor especially bright. Ostensibly the book shows what happens to these three between the years 1940 and 1947, during the ravages of World War II and the uncertainties of its aftermath...
...Elsa Navarro, a member of the Minority Student Life Committee at Princeton, said yesterday that minority students at Princeton have looked unfavorably at Simmons, believing that a number of campus regulations were enforced selectively by the office of student affairs...