Word: isabella
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...muffled by hazy memories, and by the fact that the actors speak from calm points of resolution. The reader must often settle with a single version of incidents that involve several of the other actors, a version which more often than not is exasperatingly broken by frequent explanatory comments. Isabella, for example, a beautiful alluring woman who always played the Beloved, writes her memoirs from what is an acceptable fairytale vantage point, heaven. Her happiness assured, the tale raises no great anxieties and the recounting of a gruesome and cruel death loses its cutting edge. She is the last...
...Isabella is the only one who comes close to self-fulfillment. She realizes that perhaps it is possible to infuse creativity into her roles, a creativity balanced between Flaminio's self-consuming and haphazard improvisation and Francesco's constricting memorization. She realizes that her talents have been developed as self-protection, not self-expression, as a shield against her naturally unbounded generosity, a self-destructive and explosive emotion which often vented itself in endless hours of duck-like squawking. But the best she can do, speaking from the wrong side of the heavenly gates, is whisper her confession into another...
...after. In Denver, Hod built the lady a splendiferous mansion surrounded by a hundred peacocks, nude statuary (it later had to be clothed in deference to some Denver bluenoses), and carriages of every hue to suit her costume. He bestowed on her jewels that supposedly once belonged to Queen Isabella of Spain; in fact, they had been gathered by agents from New York hock shops. He built what was possibly the country's grandest opera house and imported for Denver's delectation almost every current luminary, from Sarah Bernhardt to Oscar Wilde (who bombed...
...could to respectability as a historian. In 1948 he won a Pulitzer Prize for Across the Wide Missouri, a chronicle of fur trappers in the 1830s. Five years later, a National Book Award came for The Course of Empire, which starts with a provocative quote from Columbus to Queen Isabella and ends with the Lewis and Clarke Expedition reaching the Pacific...
Moreover, Wiesenthal, and this is a shocking surprise, often seems to be a careless detective. He moves from pure conjecture to assumed fact on the barest circumstantial evidence. But he does suggest with some conviction that the wealthy, Jewish-born Christians who financed Columbus' expedition for Ferdinand and Isabella had hopes of more than monetary return: if not the discovery of the lost tribes, perhaps at least a new land to which Jews could emigrate rather than convert to Christianity...