Word: ifs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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(He) is at the end of his twenties, lean, slight, light-skinned, freckled, pale-eyed, sharp-faced. He wears round wire-rimmed spectacles like Bertolt Brecht's and a bush of red hair teased out as if in ongoing electrocution. His chin and lips are hairless. No hippie he, his...
He didn't, though; he wrote this bloat, and he tells us why over and over again in the course of it. (In fact, if you cut out all the self-conscious justifications for the denseness and length of Letters, it would probably become both readable and manageable.)
IF YOU LOOK only at the large strokes in Letters, however, another explanation for its size emerges, one more believable, more acceptable, though less flattering to Barth. Each of his correspondents either relives or believes he is reliving a portion of his past life. Lady Amherst echoing Samuel Johnson, calls...
Barth is least of all an idiot, and this schema for each of his characters obviously governs his own writing of Letters--this novel that incorporates each of his past protagonists, that takes every one of his old plots and recycles it, that is engaged in eternal omphaloskepsis, a sort...
SOME PEOPLE WOULD CALL Robert Shaplen brave. Others would say that he is just plain crazy. Anybody who attempts to summarize 30 years of modern Asian history in a single volume is probably a little of both. A Turning Wheel is Shaplen's magnum opus, an enormous work on his...