Word: gavin
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...THOMAS GAVIN...
...much is history. First Novelist Thomas Gavin, 36, reopens this long-closed case with a single question: What if Schlumberger did not die when the newspapers claimed but lived on in obscurity, composing a private journal of his bizarre life? If such a document existed, it might tell something worth hearing about a chess genius who mysteriously elected to spend twelve years playing inferior opponents while anonymously stuffed in an airless, sweltering box. Gavin asserts that such a document did exist and that Kingkill is based on it. With this single shading of fact into fiction, the performance begins...
...well worth the price of admission. Beethoven and Napoleon materialize, as do Concord coaches, corduroy roads and a fully outfitted Mississippi River steamboat. With a few judicious details as props, Gavin creates palpable illusions of scenes 150 years old. Schlumberger and a companion stalk the New York waterfront at night: "Now and then they entered the nimbus of a gas lamp hovering just over their heads like a phosphorescing sea creature. Schlumberger heard the sinister hiss behind the glass. One pace beyond the lamp his shadow was squeezing from under his heel squat as a dwarf, and four strides later...
...that, these worthies can consider themselves lucky: they have at least had some running about to accomplish. Poor Gene Hackman is required to play a Polish general as if he were a Polish joke, while Ryan O'Neal, as General James Gavin, looks as if he is about to inquire, "Tennis, anyone?" like a summer-stock juvenile. As a general whose troops are surrounded almost the minute they hit the drop zone, Sean Connery is suitably glum. Liv Ullmann and Laurence Olivier play long-suffering Dutch locals caught up in all this boom-boom in humble, long-suffering style...
...other two Harvard divers, Craig Gavin and Steve Schramm, both freshmen, did not qualify for the Nationals although Schramm dove well enough to place sixth in the three-meter event and tenth in the one-meter competition...