Word: fictions
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...that's what it's like reading Morris' new biography, Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan (Random House; 874 pages; $35). There is fact and there is fiction, and they are jumbled together. The facts are meticulously footnoted in an epic 115-page section at the end of the book. But so is the fiction. Morris has created detailed and utterly false notes to buttress the fanciful parts of his book, which feature a fictional character, also named Edmund Morris, who is a contemporary of Dutch Reagan's. That he called the book a "memoir" and not a biography...
Morris is also a brilliant writer--of both fact and fiction. His stylishness is so dazzling that the reader may want to forgive the manipulation he has employed. Again, this re-creates the experience of being around Reagan, who was so deeply likeable as a human being that even the most querulous reporter could be charmed into protecting him from his own vacuousness...
Because fact can have far more influence than fiction. How else to explain Fragments by Binjamin Wilkomirski, a harrowing, much celebrated Holocaust memoir, which turns out to have been fabricated? The author's real name is Bruno Doesseker. He is not a child survivor of Majdanek, the son of Latvian Jews murdered in the Holocaust. He is Swiss, the son of a Protestant single mother. He never saw the Holocaust. (He claims his Holocaust memory was recalled while he was in therapy...
...Literature Thursday, with his "Tin Drum," published in 1959, cited as "one of the enduring literary works of the 20th century." "It?s an excellent award, 30 years overdue, but better late than never," says TIME literary critic Paul Gray. "?The Tin Drum? was a pioneering attempt at new fictional forms, a kind of postmodern attempt at super-realism to deal with the bizarre and ugly rise of Nazism. It was an attempt to explore history through a kind of surreal fiction...
Janet Tessler, who wrote the Harvard Magazine article, isn't the only one to fall for this currently fashionable fiction. An article published by Newhouse News Service this February concluded that conservatives are the "real minority" at Ivy League colleges...