Word: fictions
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Here I am in a fiction-writing seminar, an experience which is similar to tying gobs of fresh meat to my body and leaping into a nasty stretch of the Amazon. One by one, the piranha enter: Poodlehead, a doe-eyed boy who has already submitted two wretched, thinly-veiled masturbation poems; the Prioress, whose presence causes the room temperature to drop five degrees; Quasimodo, Sigmund the Sea Monster, the Village Idiot, the Whore of Babylon, and a host of other low characters...
...title in name only, but certainly no one is begrudging Warren's selection. He is a familiar name to the general public, probably best known for his novel All the King's Men (1946). He is the only person ever to win Pulitzer prizes for both poetry and fiction. His distinguished career seems to have made the introduction of a regal tradition into a democratic society easy for everyone involved. "I think he is such an obvious choice," says Librarian Boorstin, who made the appointment. "We were fortunate to have Robert Penn Warren with us, willing to take on this...
Alejandro is an illusive character because his friends and enemies tell contradictory stories about him, but more important because the narrator repeatedly reminds the reader that his investigations are a preparation for lying, for conjuring a fiction. Such modernist hugger-mugger has great potential for tedium. But Vargas Llosa's lucid intellect and technical gifts allow him to toy with uncertainty and shuffle time with deceptive ease. A good deal of Peru's mournful history and wretched present are economically conveyed. Leaving the Museum of the Inquisition, the narrator is confronted by a score of beggars. "They constitute a sort...
This and similarly graphic scenes serve to frame the novel's artfully related subjects: the fiction writer's need to acknowledge the deceitful nature of his craft, and the political activist's need to convince himself that his ideology is the only truth. The tragedy of Alejandro Mayta is that the give-and-take of public affairs is too perplexing for his blind faith. Like the narrator, he cannot escape the comic ironies that respect no certitudes. When free as an Andean condor, Mayta is a dedicated Communist. Imprisoned, he is a revolutionary whose zeal leads to reforming the convicts...
...stands, courses which focus on women draw a primarily female audience, as the all-female enrollment of the freshman seminar, Fiction and the Female Self in the 19th Century, makes only too clear...