Word: first-person
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...impediment is a kind of cultural preconception, an unstated assumption that any art flourishing in Latin America will be too exotic or too frivolous for North American tastes. Rita Guibert sets out to show how misleading this assumption is. She presents her argument in an arresting series of long, first-person interviews with seven of Spanish America's leading writers. They form a marvelous bridge of words to another culture, another world...
...Cappella, his first novel, is a strange mixture of forms; certainly not a novel in the ordinary sense. The story weaves around two characters--one young, one old--who lie in adjacent beds in a hospital surgical ward. A copyist assigned to note everything dictated by the young man, Byron, relates the story. But the copyist makes his task a greater one and copies diligently not only what Byron says, but what he thinks, and also what his roommate, the 70-year-old Cappella, says and thinks and does. The novel is this copyist's first-person diary, complete with...
...claim these pieces as part of "feminine sensibility" simply gives them more credit than they deserve. They are, in general, mediocre work, self-indulgent, one-dimensional, or just badly written. There are a few exceptions: Sadie Stern's long first-person story called "The Saddest Young Woman" is stylistically promising if immature. Cynthia MacDonald's "Another Attempt at the Trick" is a deft and chatty poem symbolizing art as a fantastic tight-rope walk. The visuals are of a quality that tends to embarrass the verbals: there is an excellent photo essay on Hell's Angels by Barbara Boatner...
JOAN DIDION'S SCREENPLAY transfers many of her book's best elements to the film. Besides emphasizing the film's first-person point of view, Maria's soundtrack commentary fills in gaps where dramatization would only waste time. In the book Maria talked about Carter's first films; here we see and use them to piece together her past. Her descriptions of her mentally disturbed daughter, Kate, find visual equivalents in her visits to the institution where Carter has committed their daughter. On the other hand, with the fast-cut flashbacks to Maria's coerced abortion, the style distracts...
...Yorker cartoons without pictures? Indeed, nearly all the stories first appeared in that magazine. At times Barthelme even dabbles in the first-person plural as if he were spoofing the "We" of The Talk of the Town. Only once does he break tone and give a hint of the robust tall-tale telling of his native Texas. He describes his grandfather, who, with good looks and a bottle of Teamster's Early Grave, convinced a conservation-minded wood nymph to transform herself "into one million board feet of one-by-ten of the very poorest quality neatly stacked...