Word: final
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...book’s final pages, the lines between Kemal, the narrator, and the “real” Pamuk blur to the point of indistinguishability—all three men come to seem interchangeable with each other, as well as with any of the narrators in Pamuk’s other books. These tiny, invisible connections unspool gradually to spin out a place both intricate and familiar, the nostalgia-saturated inverse of the fast-paced modern city: turning the first few pages of the “Innocence” feels like nothing more than coming home...
...Tempest” with strange and wistful words: his spells are breaking even as he speaks; his return to the mortal world—and to a death that, though outside the comedy’s arc, feels eerily close—is imminent. But Shakespeare’s final play is too full, quakes with too much wonder and life to fall beneath the long shadow of its author’s final bow. The end, be it of magic, of art, or of life, comes only as Prospero himself, satisfied, willingly relinquishes...
...novel, from Axler’s time in a mental institution following his breakdown, to his affair with a 20-years-junior lesbian family friend named Pegeen Mike (after a character in Synge’s “Playboy of the Western World”), and his final projection fantasy and eventual ‘humbling’ at Pegeen’s hands, is essentially in deference to that central question. It’s a cruel (if not particularly funny) joke that Axler’s breakdown ensued after a failed Prospero/Macbeth double bill. It?...
...even that gesture, a suicide tailored in the fashion of Chekov’s “The Seagull,” with a note bearing that play’s final lines, is inherently a performance; “It was in an Actors Studio Broadway production of ‘The Seagull,’ and it marked his first big New York success, making him the most promising young actor of the season, full of certainty and a sense of singularity, and leading to every unforeseeable contingency.” For Axler, this consummate performance, this total...
Even the transgressive sexual dynamic that takes hold of the final chapter is hemmed in by the novel’s overtly intellectualized conceit. Pegeen’s reversion from lesbianism, rather than providing the sufficiently developed emotional component that would complicate the novel in an engaging way, merely serves to mix and match psychoanalytic tropes through progressively convoluted and prop-oriented sexual encounters. She becomes a symbol for Axler’s diminished potency, literally wearing a symbol of phallic power during their lovemaking, and his realization of that fact does little more than render it explicit...