Word: emma
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...older woman. In The Perpetual Orgy, a highly original work of nonfiction, part literary testament and part critical study of Madame Bovary, the author confesses to carrying a torch for the novel's heroine, soon to be 130. Peru's Vargas Llosa belongs to a long line of Emma Bovary's professional admirers. Gustave Flaubert's scandalous character has vamped the imaginations and intellects of writers from Baudelaire to Woody Allen, whose l971 short story The Kugelmass Episode conjures a contemporary character who can transport himself to Yonville to play a role in Madame Bovary. "The mark of a classic...
Spoken like a regular Thornton Wilder. But then part of Byrne's deft comic talent has always been that he is a quick study. Born in Dumbarton, Scotland, Byrne moved with his mother Emma and electrical engineer father Tom first to Hamilton, Ont. (where Sister Celia was born), and then to Baltimore. Young David arrived there at age seven with an already burgeoning interest in music. (His folks say he played his phonograph almost perpetually from age three and took up the harmonica at five...
...afternoons -- a habit in which David still indulges -- or that Tom Byrne seemed to others to be just the kind of mildly eccentric technowhiz who really could, as family legend insists, have once fixed a submarine with a coat hanger. The Byrnes were politically active and socially liberal; Emma Byrne is a Quaker. Folk and Scottish music was played in the house, and the Byrnes seemed to be the only parents around who were not making speeches and threats about everything from loud rock to long hair...
Music had always been important, of course -- by high school, David was onto the violin, accordion and guitar -- but Emma remembers an art and music exposition in Montreal that sent her 15-year-old son off in another direction. "As soon as we came back," she says, "David spent the next few months in the basement, painting and just doing things all day." Some of David's efforts are still to be seen in the town house in Columbia, Md., where the Byrnes live now, including a comic strip he drew to illustrate some personal notions of paradise. "When...
...Life in Emma's England may have been pleasant, but no modern intruder would feel at home there. Houses with handsome fireplaces remained pretty cold, reading by candlelight was difficult, and there was still no running water. It was only the industrial era that brought such improvements as household gas lamps in the 1840s, electricity in the 1880s and then the great heap of laborsaving appliances at the turn of the century. In 1870 fully 60% of employed American women worked as household servants; 50 years later most of the servants had vanished, to be replaced by electric vacuums...