Word: iras
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Those who wondered not only whether but how Roth would resolve his dilemma now have at least an introductory answer. The first installment of Mercy of a Rude Stream displays documentary rather than novelistic ambitions. It takes its young hero, Ira Stigman, from his eighth year, in 1914, after he and his parents have moved from the Lower East Side to an apartment in Harlem, up to age 14. It also offers interpolated passages in which Ira as an aging man conducts imagined conversations with the computer on which he is writing his life story. Late in this novel, Ira...
...Ira's way -- and Roth's as well -- takes the reader through a pretty grim, no-frills narrative. The order is relentlessly chronological. Ira, devastated by the loss of his East Side haunts and friends and upset by the anti-Semitic taunts he hears in heterogeneous Harlem, ages predictably year by year. He adores his mother and fears his irritable father. He changes schools. He develops a nascent interest in girls and feels ashamed of himself for doing so. The outbreak of World War I is noted on the first page; the armistice is mentioned on page 153. Transitions...
Even the dialogue seems abstracted, drained of felt emotion. Ira's immigrant relatives say book-talk things like "Woe is me" and "I would spit in his face, if I could but see him." Memories of his past have obviously obsessed Roth for most of his adult life, but he no longer seems willing -- as he did so memorably in Call It Sleep -- to let his readers experience and savor them firsthand. Perhaps when later volumes of Ira's story appear, the place of this first long chapter in the grand design will be clearer. For now, the book...
London in 1974 is a war zone as well. A series of bombing attacks by the IRA has the city living in fear. Yet it is better for Gerry Conlon to live here than Belfast, or "this God-forsaken place," as both his father and aunt put it. Gerry has been sent to London to clean up, but instead he and a friend discover commune life, drugs, and petty theivery. He is a ragged, vain, young man, who uses the word "fuck" indiscriminately and consistently...
...Lewis' and Postlethwaite's interpretations of Gerry and Guiseppe are captivating: In their helplessness, Gerry is prone to bouts of charged insanity while the sick Guiseppe sinks into silent meekness. However, their humanity shines in comparison to their unpredictable prison-mate, Joe (Don Baker), the silent, controlling IRA terrorist who is actually responsible for the Guildford bombing...