Word: flittings
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...your hand a few inches from your line of sight and counting your fingers. And if someone removed and reinserted an object every time you blinked (which experimenters can simulate by flashing two pictures in rapid sequence), you would be hard pressed to notice the change. Ordinarily, our eyes flit from place to place, alighting on whichever object needs our attention on a need-to-know basis. This fools us into thinking that wall-to-wall detail was there all along--an example of how we overestimate the scope and power of our own consciousness...
Kostova successfully fills out these pages through a multi-layered framing device: as Paul and his daughter flit about Western Europe and the Eastern Bloc—brokering peace agreements and possibly being stalked by an undead librarian—our intrepid historian interweaves correspondence and flashbacks to fill us in on Paul and Rossi’s back stories...
Characters? Oh, there are lots of characters. Easily more than 100 flit in and out of the madly proliferating plotlines. And those plots? In a novel that begins at the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and concludes in the aftermath of World War I, one that passes through Colorado, Venice, London, Vienna, Mexico, central Asia, the upper atmosphere and the fourth dimension, there are frequent stretches where a new plot seems to start every paragraph or two. The book opens with the Chums of Chance, a quarrelsome brotherhood of operatives that pops up throughout the novel, circumnavigating the globe...
Picture your favorite old, black and white horror movie: the innocent young girl is apprehensively peering around the corner or creeping up the creaky staircase; shadows flit across the wall; a door slams shut; just when you least expect it, Dracula jumps out and grabs our terrified heroine, complete with a big, climactic organ swell! Now would the scene have been at all frightening without those cacophonous organ notes? Certainly not. Maybe the Harvard Organ Society didn’t have such dramatic ideas behind their midnight Halloween concert, but nine performers explored the spookier side of the instrument late...
...loading bay; now the vehicles move through a bright, gleaming shop floor--with American flags draped from the ceiling--in an assembly-line method, complete with a horn that blares every 23 min. to signal a move to a new station. Workers called waterspiders (named for the bugs that flit across the top of ponds) scurry back and forth to fetch tools and equipment for higher-skilled mechanics, who stay close to the humvees. Evans tracks the slightest delays. When an employee missed work for a family emergency last December and slowed the entire line, Evans realized that...