Word: glassing
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...good Lord must love the nouveaux riches, because he made so many of them. He also seems to have provided a surfeit of writers to turn their freshly gilded lives into trashy novels. Among recent scribes who specialize in pressing readers' noses against the glass that separates them from the best of everything is Dominick Dunne (The Two Mrs. Grenvilles). His latest is sodden with the sort of unimaginative stock characters that have tumbled out of all the rich-and-famous pseudo fiction of the 1980s. The setting is Manhattan's Upper East Side, the pricey arena where old-moneyed...
...year is 1866, and an English governess consigned to doleful duty in a remote Australian backwater has her thoughts interrupted by a preposterous vision: "She was running through her list of unsatisfactory or irritating or boorish suitors when she saw a church made from glass towed into her field of vision by two men in wide straw hats." This is no hallucination. The crystalline minicathedral that floats into view, with a framework of iron, measures 50 ft. in length and 22 ft. 6 in. across. It weighs twelve tons...
...time the governess beholds the church, Australian Author Peter Carey's third novel has begun to build to a spectacular finish. But none of the surprises to come are any more outlandish than the trail of circumstances and coincidences that have led up to them. Like the glass structure it celebrates, Oscar and Lucinda seems the stuff of shimmering, transparent fantasy, held together by the struts of 19th century history and the mullions of painstaking detail. The book does not, of course, weigh twelve tons, but it will seem substantial enough to readers unable to put it down...
Carey's title provides an answer to the first and most obvious question: Who on earth would go to the considerable trouble of making a glass church materialize in the Australian outback? Why, Oscar and Lucinda, naturally. But who are (or were) they, what brought them together, and why did they conceive such a pointless, improbable dream? Explanations, as the author supplies them, grow ever less simple and more entertaining...
Today I have little; no awards, no trophies. Yet, I often go down the street of broken glass snapping my fingers. I hear the music inside and no one will ever be able to take that from me. To make music one does not need a special gift for performance. In the world of the blues or the church you do not have to be a soloist to give testimony...