Word: gothic
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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With The Obscene Bird of Night (1973), his fourth book, Chilean Author José Donoso joined the front ranks of South American fabulists. His sprawling novel not only housed more grotesques than a whole rack of Gothic thrillers; it also offered a narrator who pretended to be a deaf-mute, baroque retellings of native legends and a riot of inventiveness. Donoso was inevitably mentioned in the same breath with Borges and Marquez as yet another prophetic surrealist bent on reimagining his colorful, tragic continent...
Andropov's continuing absence means a power vacuum at the top of the Soviet pyramid, and the result appears to be paralysis and attendant political jockeying. That insecurity was vividly illustrated at a diplomatic reception in the Kremlin's gothic Hall of St. George following last week's anniversary parade. Politburo members at the fete shunned their foreign guests and instead conferred among themselves behind banquet tables. As a U.S. State Department official put it in Washington, "It's like a court without a king. Who makes decisions...
ELLEN SCHWAMM's How He Saved Her, the fictional autobiography of a New York socialite, may well interest fans of the 19th-century Gothic romance. Her Nora Ingarten is, enviably enough, the Gothic heroine of the '80s. Admittedly not young and violable. Nora is already married, the mother of two chic and witty Amherst-bound offspring. But her marriage to a conservative tax lawyer has stunted rather than matured her, and she has persisted as confused, dogged and sensitive as a teenage heroine. How He Saved Her tells the story of Nora's enlightenment through her elusive and brutal seducer...
Nora as heroine is defenseless and lovable but tries our patience. She hasn't an ounce of spunk--an unfortunate deviation from the Gothic tradition. Asking for a joint bank account becomes a crisis of independence. After being robbed of her wedding ring and wristwatch, she wonders whether the event was unreal or surreal. Our sympathy for Nora is further lessened by Schwamm's emphasis on Nora's contradictory and oppressive wealth. It is hard to feel for the frenzy of the poor little rich girl when it is described in terms of "her pulse...beating against the hammered gold...
Around noon a crowd began gathering in front of the huge neo-Gothic Parliament building facing the Danube, intending to present Premier Nagy with a petition demanding the withdrawal of all Soviet troops. Soviet tanks and a phalanx of security police blocked all entrances to the building. Trigger-sensitive young Russian tankists became unnerved by the milling crowd around them and began firing indiscriminately into the mass of unarmed people. In a few minutes hundreds of men and women were lying dead or wounded on the ground...