Word: ennui
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Much of Life After God is well-written. Like Ian McEwan, Coupland has a particular talent for capturing ennui. In "Little Creatures," the narrator muses: "The nomadic lifestyle had taken its toll. I had been feeling permanently on the cusp of a flu, feeling at the point where I just wanted to borrow somebody else's coat-borrow somebody else's life-their aura. I seemed to have lost the ability to create any more aura on my own. "But the failure to move beyond this signals Coupland's main weakness as a writer...
Throughout the 1980s and '90s young first-time novelists have persisted in making detachment their dominion. Those writers have created worlds in which contemporary characters speak in a passionless staccato as they find themselves ravaged not by tragedy but rather by vague ennui...
...deal with undergraduates' every concern. Knowles' failure to consult undergraduates in the appointment of Professor Lewis was a simple mistake, and unless the staff cites other specific examples of Knowles being "hopelessly, and unapologetically, out of touch," it should not be construed as evidence of any Ivory-tower ennui. --Tehshik P. Yoon...
...Hamilton, where the bleakness of the scenery--that bond which ties it to the other three rural hockey hotbeds of the Empire State--is matched only by the Red Raider fans' indifference. You have to generate your own energy to win at Colgate: the home crowd's eternal ennui won't help you along...
...scheme -- to the red telephone, awning, sweater, and so on. Kieslowski has a fashion photographer's showy sense of pictorial alienation. He'll isolate Valentine (as in Valentine's Day, heart, red; get it?) in a corner of the film frame or pose her in an attitude of anxious ennui. It's the most literal-minded form of movie expressionism: meticulous, handsome, remote...