Word: epigraphes
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...placed side by side: never equivocated, but inextricable from one another. The novel’s end comes suddenly, without reflection or resolution, as Archimboldi prepares to depart for Santa Teresa—the novel’s first cause. “2666” begins with an epigraph from Charles Baudelaire (“An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom”) and for many of the book’s critics, it never delivers more than that. But the novel’s central aspiration—perhaps disastrously, the one that...
...Armies” begins with an epigraph from Moliere: “N’y a-t-il point quelque danger a contrefaire le mort?” (“Is there not some danger in refusing death?”). Rosero’s novel offers us an answer: to refuse death is to invite madness in the form of Ismael’s cultish devotion to his missing wife. But it is also to maintain a kind of integrity, to supplant the inevitability of death with the logic of love, by marshalling...
...such blurring of lines between imagination and reality were not enough, Giscard starts the novel with the epigraph "Promise kept." Myriad press reports of the book have paired that opener with final lines of the tale, in which Patricia tells Lambertye, "You asked my permission to write your story. I grant it to you, but you must make me a promise ..." Such subtlety is usually administered with a sledgehammer...
Keegan is smart about where she roots the suspense in her novel. Pip's Olympic quest may be ripped from Michael Phelps' headlines, but we don't have to sweat a photo finish. We know she'll get gold from the epigraph, a quote from her coach that's another deliciously ironic swipe at the double-edged sword of accomplishment: "If this exceptional athlete wore all the Olympic gold medals she has won in her long career and jumped find a pool, she would sink." What we find out is how much Pip's triumphs cost and how they change...
...across the United Kingdom by celebrations. To foot the bill for the traditional fireworks, children roam the streets in the days leading up to the event, brandishing their effigies - known as "Guys" - and ask passers-by for a "penny for the guy." (The phrase famously serves as the second epigraph to T.S. Eliot's 1927 meditation on despair, "The Hollow Men.") Families gather for food and festivities that might seem incongruous with the event's bloody origins - although perhaps not as incongruous as lighting fireworks and bonfires to celebrate an abortive attempt at arson...