Word: fictional
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Matthiessen is a noted explorer and naturalist as well as a novelist. Back in 1967, he sailed on a turtle boat out of Grand Cayman. As thoroughly as possible with words on paper, he has duplicated that experience, creating along the way an uncommonly successful mixture of fact and fiction. Far Tortuga is a treatise on turtling, an account of the dying days of sailing ships on unspoiled waters, and a history of a locale that winter tourists tripping through the Caribbean rarely see. Most memorably, it is a spare adventure tale about simple men driven to the extremities...
...FICTION 1 -The Moneychangers, Hailey (1 last week...
Insofar as the book has any kind of climax, it is the middle chapter on "The Adolescent as Heroine." It is not surprising that most fiction dealing with women, especially that written before this century, casts the adolescent as heroine: for centuries, adolescence was the climax and turning point of a woman's life, the time when she married and took on another--a man's--identity. But more significant is the potence of adolescence as a metaphor for woman's condition. Women, like adolescents, are frustrated in their desire for autonomy; they are encouraged to remain children; their attempts...
...perfectly justified, but there's no good universe next door, no way out, young potential revolutionaries can't find their revolution. So they marry in defeat or go mad in a complicated form of triumph, their meaning the inevitability of failure. More vividly than older women in fiction, they express women's anger and self-hated and the feeling that there's no way out. Pain is the human condition, but more particularly, these books announce, the female condition... The women novelists who depict their plight find in it constant images of challenge aborted or safely contained: the general fate...
...diary is ersatz ersatz journalism: and if, as Swados himself once wrote old-time leftists can have "the spooky aspect of a gathering of ghosts," then Lumen has the spooky aspect of the ghost of a ghost. Whereas it's people--real and living ones--that shape politics and fiction alike...