Word: falin
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...when Kit arrives at college and her brother Ben dies in the Vietnam War, we do not feel her grief. The incident stops up Kit’s self-expression and she vows never again to write verse. Then she finds Falin, the soul of poetry. When their student-teacher acquaintanceship matures into a love, he asks her to write English translations of his Russian work. Collaborating on the translations, they soon disburden themselves of startlingly parallel lives. She helps him, and he her, to exorcise the ghosts of the past, and she begins to rehabilitate a social life...
...sheer number of simplifications involved in the political message tends to undermine its effect; the novel should remain the story of Falin and Kit. There is something truly poignant in the image of two powerless people huddled in a house in the Midwest while the warring national powers fight overhead...
Instead, the book opens into widening circles. Crowley’s story soon has three principal figures, though the third, JFK, remains distant. Nonetheless, he is at the center of the novel as the last true American poet, the last person to carry the nation’s spirit. Falin speaks of Pushkin as Kit might speak of JFK: a national poet “must express our spirit, must stand for us and speak...
...characters share a common spirit. JFK, Kit, Falin and the rest feel the same feelings about the same issues. Where is the hardcore right-winger amid the peace societies and socialist social clubs Kit meets? It is easy to highlight essential similarities when there are only surface differences. These are all familiar characters, partly because their types are so worked-over in Hollywood mythologies: the concerned parents, the suicidal adolescent, her mentor the mysterious, wise...
...making them the product of a high-school student, and of Falin’s by presenting them only in translations—which are, we understand, far inferior to the rhymed, rhythmic originals. But if the reader is to share the semi-religious experiences of Kit and Falin, the poetry in question must be more than mere scaffolding to advance the author’s themes...