Word: itches
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...positive, creative urges over surrender to chaos. Updike has become a mature commentator; if his characters don't know their ultimate fate, they do determine their direction. Even "The Witnesses," the story nearest to tragedy (and one of Updike's best), portrays a mediocre man with a sexual itch who succeeds, much to the discomfort of his respectable friends, in weirdly legitimizing an actually sordid affair. In other hands, the material would be dreary, condescending; Updike makes it moving and unsettling...
...Jews a "bond of suffering that comes whenever Jews are threatened." He felt the pull of that bond when he attended an international conference in Kiev last summer. After a VIP tour of the city, he became uneasy. "The [concentration camp] numbers on my arm," he recalls, "began to itch." When his turn came to speak, he threw away his prepared text and told the Soviet hosts that the tour had been incomplete: it had not included Babi Yar, where the German Occupation forces had killed hundreds of thousands of Kiev citizens, starting with 70,000 Jews. After a stunned...
...momentarily, the two of you simply stand there. You trying to figure out whether you're acting more like Tom Ewell in "The Seven-Year Itch" or is it Tony Curtis in "Some Like It Hot," Liz in the infamous white hotpants she wore to last spring's Boston Book Fair, making like June in the Rodgers & Hammerstein lyric...
...wind that blows no one in the Middle East any good. It picks up hot air and dust as it sweeps across Africa and the Sinai Peninsula, bringing a variety of afflictions in its northerly thrust. The moistureless air causes feet to swell painfully, noses and eyes to itch and asthmatics to gasp for breath. The khamsin can also madden men. Automobile accidents are far more frequent when it is blowing, crime rates increase by as much as 20% and tempers rise with the mercury. Judges in some Arab countries take a lenient attitude toward crimes committed during the khamsin...
...whole film has been pointing-the parting of the friends in London-and instead, he concludes with the cheap sentimentality of Gus' reunion with his children. The film then ends with an ambiguity-not the provoking open-endedness of good questions raised, but the nagging sense of an itch left unscratched...