Word: enigma
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Claude Chabrol defines absurdity as the gap between the awesome finality of death and the trivial reasons men adduce for killing or putting themselves in the way of being killed. To him, murder is the ultimate emotional excess, an enigma he has worried with a tough-minded, ironic and often subtle compassion in such recent films as This Man Must Die and Le Boucher. These movies are about the exorcizing of private demons. Never until The Nada Gang has Chabrol concerned himself with murder in its most absurd manifestation-as an act of public political protest...
...burglar who amiably loots the guesthouse where a pedantic writer is staying, then, like a Manson of letters, coolly destroys the writer's notes and manuscript for a book about Thomas Love Peacock, a 19th century writer of burlesque romances (who is, incidentally, one of Fowles' favorite writers). The Enigma, a marvelous piece of illusion, describes a London police sergeant's search for a paradigm of Establishment life in the form of a conservative M.P., who has, perhaps deliberately, disappeared...
...diary's first volume, Freud's one-time disciple, Otto Rank, analyzes Anais. By the fifth volume, her digressions on neurosis come as a matter of course. With the conviction that personality has ceased to be an enigma, she resolves to deflate her anxieties with keen insight, pretty much like the prick of a needle eliminates balloons. To this end, she doggedly pries apart relationships and scrutinizes the pieces for wear. It turns out that the traits she rebels against in friends often lurk unacknowledged in herself, so that an end to friendships ends external friction, while the sparks smolder...
Bits of fantasy occur at different times, and the girls must compare their separate experiences-all archetypes from childhood fairy tales-to piece together the whole magical enigma...
...followed and photographed everywhere, from the top of the Great Wall of China to the high plains of Peru, but in many ways Pat Nixon as First Lady was even more of an enigma than her husband. She was a profoundly private woman whose true feelings were known only to herself. To the world, she was the perfect presidential wife, tireless, modestly chic, coolly regal. To her family, she was the ultimate support, so accustomed to smiling through adversity that it became routine. When she was a girl, she once said, "life was sort of sad, so I tried...