Word: eyeful
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...create these tales Rendell has spent quite a lot of time thinking about unpleasant people. The central character in Live Flesh, Rendell's 31st book of fiction in 22 years, is a rapist, mutilator and murderer. A Dark-Adapted Eye, Rendell's first under a new pen name, Barbara Vine, imagines a murder preceded by intimations of incest, infanticide and homosexual child molestation, all within the bosom of an apparently conventional and loving clan...
...Dark-Adapted Eye belongs to the genre of old murders reconsidered. But the question of who did what to whom and why is teasingly left unresolved. Nonetheless, the reader is almost certain to become enmeshed in the story of domineering, possessive Vera Hillyard, her malicious older son, her seemingly illegitimate younger son, and the devoted sister who secretly seeks to escape Vera's grasp and instead provokes a murder...
...surprising that a writer tempted to kill off her moneymaking detectives resists repeating herself. The New Girl Friend, a volume of short stories published earlier this year, displayed a dry, macabre humor. Live Flesh is an intimately detailed working-class character study. And A DarkAdapted Eye is a contemporary version of the sprawling Edwardian family tale and a minor classic. Its central theme is the nature of how to tell a story. It begins, and begins again and again -- each time more ripely. Its searching in direction after direction, its inclusion of swatches of pseudojournalism, its final metaphysical ruminations...
Though designed for foreigners, the course would be an eye-opener to most Americans, who rarely reflect on the quantity of slang and colloquialisms they use. Even the President talks about making some foreign government "say uncle" (an expression from the Irish anacol, meaning mercy). Non-slang can baffle by its seeming want of logic. Is a billboard a board on which you stick a bill? Jingle? "Is that an Irish song?" a student asked. "What does it mean," another wondered, "to kick...
...ugly scourge of old was drought and dust storms that tore the earth apart. And it is again this summer in the South. Yet that is temporary. The more menacing scourge is verdant bounty as far as the eye can see in the nation's midsection and diminishing markets for the rich harvests. Dan Rather and his combat jacket have long ago left the hogpens to report on other worldly terrors, like the wedding of Andy and Fergie. Hollywood's Jessica Lange and Country are wilted memories. Farm foreclosures are too common to rate as pop drama any longer...