Word: fictions
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Author Iris Murdoch's devoted readers have learned, after 21 novels, to expect abstract, philosophic patterns beneath the beguiling surface of her fiction. The Good Apprentice, No. 22, seems designed to shake admirers out of such complacency. Murdoch includes most of her by now familiar clues to deeper meanings: constant references to God, lesser deities, the devil, good, evil, myths, legends, magic, and the power of elemental forces like water to nurture and destroy. But this time out, such allusions do not point toward an order underlying reality. They mirror instead a dazzling chaos of Murdoch's invention...
Normally in Murdoch's fiction, isolated and frankly artificial settings help resolve dilemmas or at least recast them into familiar types of allegory. But Seegard adds to Edward's confusion and despair. Nothing here is quite what it seems, and the moment one set of deceptions is exposed, another takes its place. Edward finds Jesse, but the old man is apparently being held prisoner in his own house. He says the three dutiful acolytes have tried to poison him. The women tell Edward that Jesse is ill and deranged, a demigod whose powers have failed. The visitor wonders...
...distant as South Korea and Argentina; among them will be three Nobel prizewinners and such luminaries as Günter Grass, Nadine Gordimer, Octavio Paz and Eugène Ionesco. The weeklong festivities will feature more than 30 panels on subjects as diverse as Translating Whitman, Alienation and the State, Science Fiction, and Censorship in the U.S.A. Total tab for the event, according to PEN: around...
Like War of the Worlds, Orson Welles' famous 1938 radio ruse that convinced thousands of Americans that Martians had invaded New Jersey, the 2½-hour Finnish program was out-and-out fiction, adapted from U.S. Playwright Jan Hartman's prizewinning play The Next War. Despite several on-air warnings, the Finnish broadcast sparked hours of panic, during which emergency telephone lines were jammed. "I really thought war had come," said Helsinki Engineer Matti Korponen. Mirjam Polkunen, head of theatrical broadcasting for Radio Finland, promised no such "documentaries" would ever again be aired. Said she: "We didn't mean to scare...
...decision has stirred a legal tempest. Harriet Cohen, president of the New York Women's Bar Association, calls it "a major victory for justice and fair play." Philadelphia Lawyer Edward Blumstein disagrees. "The highest court in New York," he says, "has created a legal fiction." In fact, the New York decision is not unique; 13 other states, by statute or court ruling, recognize a spousal property interest in a professional degree. But, asks Harry Tindall, chairman of the family-law section of the state bar of Texas, "if a college professor has tenure, how do you quantify that? Will...