Word: humanity
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...purpose of deposing an authoritarian ruler [in Iraq], human suffering became subordinate to other political objectives," Papandreou added...
...what actually happened, for while her collection of short stories, Flying Leap, received critical acclaim, If I Told You Once lacks the candor, unexpected plots and zany characterizations of her first work. Budnitz's new book emerges as a poorly conceived attempt to weave together mysticism and dramatic human relationships, taking reckless stylistic risks in the process...
Budnitz employs four women as narrators, all from different generations of the same family, who together grapple with the inconclusive questions of human existence. Ilana's narration greets, and scares, the reader first. Ilana is a woman of the old country, probably Russia, who somehow falls in love with a stranger and finds herself in an unnamed American city. Her journey comprises stories of rape and incest, murder and solicitation, placed in a mythical context of forests and magic. A "man in the forest laughing with little pointed teeth" violates her, yet gives her a Faberge egg. This egg becomes...
...conflict of old values and new, western values through the interplay between Ilana and Sashie. However, an analysis of dishtowels, tea leaves and hospitalization from two perspectives destroys the potential depth of this exchange. Budnitz tries to be too profound in her simplification, taking on too large a human theme within too small of a context...
...novel dissolves rapidly after Sashie gives birth to her daughter, Mara, and it continues to unravel with the later insertion of Mara's niece, Naomi, as the final narrator. The work changes from a mythical tract to a soap opera of human fallibility. In the last section of the novel, one gets the impression that Budnitz wants to explore every facet of the human experience: mother and daughter, east and west, moral dilemmas and cheap symbolism...