Word: flanagan
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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This year's third (!) and most ambitious novel about Dickens is Wanting, by the Australian - or if you like, Tasmanian - writer Richard Flanagan. Wanting begins when Dickens is mourning the death of his ninth child, Dora, and feeling increasingly alienated from his wife and from himself. "They say Christ was a good man," he cracks, "but did he ever live with a woman?" Flanagan's Dickens is a man who has only ever lived emotionally through his novels. Acting in Collins' play, which was called The Frozen Deep, he sets free feelings he was accustomed to keeping tightly confined...
...Franklin, a man just plain starving? "We all have appetites and desires," Dickens says, "but only the savage agrees to sate them." The revelation that the stuffy Victorians had desires and acted on them isn't a particularly shocking one (nor would it have shocked an actual Victorian). But Flanagan makes the matter more interesting by posing it in the form of an insoluble dilemma: Which is worse, giving in to desire or keeping it locked up inside? "If you turn away from love," Franklin's widow asks, "did it mean you no longer existed?" Each one can lead...
...balance things out, Flanagan also gives us an actual savage, a young Tasmanian Aborigine named Mathinna. Earlier in his career, Franklin and his wife had adopted Mathinna, an orphan, and then tried to make her into a good Victorian girl. But she ends up a lost plaything, at home nowhere, a novelty like her own pet albino possum, batted this way and that by the rich white people who dote on her and then discard her. Mathinna is Flanagan's most successful creation, and his saddest. She's a savage ruined by the desires of the cultured English - an irony...
...athlete, they would test him for amphetamines. He would come up clean - but they would test him." - One-time congressional opponent Michael P. Flanagan, on Blagojevich's endurance, Chicago Sun-Times...
...nice to face that kind of competition and be in that atmosphere, because ultimately that’s where we want to be as a program.” Perhaps the Crimson can even the playing field when it fills the holes in its lineup. Senior Andrew Flanagan (165 lbs.) was a late scratch, joining sophomore Corey Jantzen (141) and rookie Zack Pope (125) as the third starter held out of the tournament.With the 125 and 141 positions empty, Harvard began all three matches with a 12-0 deficit, keeping the squad from posing a serious threat...