Word: fatalism
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Thanks to drugs, surgery and mechanical devices, a failing heart need not be fatal. Machines or transplants can also preserve life when the kidneys stop working. The patient whose liver can no longer metabolize and dispose of his body's poisonous wastes, however, eventually lapses into a coma and dies. Exchange transfusions to replace most of his blood may help for short periods, but no machine yet devised can substitute for the organ, and the livers of pigs and calves have proved inadequate to the task of cleansing human blood. Now it appears that in a liver coma crisis...
...Abouna group's first two patients were suffering from fulminating viral hepatitis, which had completely shut down their liver function. Death was only hours away when Abouna resorted to the use of baboons. The animals were given fatal doses of anesthesia. Their excised livers were then washed in order to remove, as much as possible, the proteins that might trigger a reaction in the patient. Finally, the patients' circulatory systems were hooked up to the blood vessels of the isolated livers, which rested at bedside in stainless steel chambers. While the patients' blood circulated through the baboon...
Around this ill-matched pair cluster ranks of middle-aged lovers and seekers, winners and mostly losers, caught in the "horrible, messy world of quarreling and forgiving." As the book runs its course, there are endless realliances of romance and necessity, suicide attempts, fatal mishaps, missing persons, blackmail. Cutting from character to character in short sequences, the author builds suspense reliably and often ingeniously. In the end, however, only Ludwig, who must choose between "unreason and dishonor," seems to have faced a true crisis. In leaving Gracie and sailing home, he achieves integrity after a long struggle...
...Brazil, especially Amazonia, is the last old-fashioned Eldorado left, a trove of unexploited gold, rare woods, precious stones, exotic pelts and untold deposits of minerals. It is also one of the last places where the bloodshot eye of the fatigued humanist can still see in progress the fatal consequences of Eldorado: the destruction of indigenous peoples. Lucien Boclard, a French journalist and author (The Quicksand War: Prelude to Vietnam), takes it all in, from the first Amazon man hunts in the 16th century to the huge inland island of Bananal where today Indian survivors stage ceremonies and even wars...
...book's failure shows itself not in Cyril's character, as such, but in his flaw as an unreliable narrator. Not only does his insensitive greed provoke a climate for disaster (with Hugh's death in a fatal game of masturbatory coupe-corde, and Catherine's descent into madness), but his absolute self-preoccupation and enfuriating blindness deprive the story of its tragic force. Crushing Hawkes's poetry is the dead weight of what he contrives as Cyril's stupid prose...