Word: finus
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Time passes and paths cross. But Birdie and Finus never do get together. Unlike in Gabriel García Márquez’ Love in the Time of Cholera, the ill-starred couple never are united, even as a reward for outliving their circumstantial adversaries—their spouses...
...live happily ever after, Watson says, “I think all too often people don’t end up with the love of their lives. They end up with someone they love okay and they stick it out, or they don’t. Finus and Birdie never get together, and to some extent it’s a result of bad timing, the odd luck of timing, that so often keeps people so right for each other apart...
Interestingly, the execution of the novel itself seems to parallel the failed love of Birdie and Finus. There are points at which the timing is off; the chronological contortions are jarring and characters narrate out of nowhere...
Subplots involving Parnell Grimes, the director of Mercury’s funeral home, also compromise the harmony of the tale. The necrophiliac undertaker and his wife, who dies a little death for him at orgasm, may serve as a counterpoint to Finus and Birdie’s unfulfilled sexualities—even the dead can copulate, but they can’t. Still, the new characters feel sensationally extraneous...
...Watson says, “the ‘Heaven of Mercury’ [is] everywhere. In the characters’ minds, and their memories, in the presence of the dead in their waking and dreaming lives, and in their communion with spirits, real or imagined.” Finus writes obituaries about his friends and acquaintances for the Mercury newspaper, which he edits and owns. The dead are constantly being summed up into bulleted recollections and pithy paragraphs. Ghostly spirits appear, too, and infiltrate reality on a regular basis; this happens much more at the end, when the tale...