Word: kavanagh
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...much of it eagerly, indeed cheerfully, recounted in the British press. He left his wife of almost 10 years and his two sons to take up with an American woman. Dissatisfied with the negotiations for the rights to his eighth novel, The Information, he dumped his agent, Pat Kavanagh, thereby infuriating her husband, the author Julian Barnes, who was until that moment one of Amis' closest friends. Amis underwent a long bout of dental reconstruction, prompting reporters to observe, in print, that he was not only a failed husband and father and money-mad but vain as well. And then...
...Patrick Kavanagh...
Only a cerebral Gumby would remain unsculpted by the mental body-building required to translate James Joyce's Ulysses into Mandarin Chinese. In spite of extensive time spent in Beijing doing just that, Patrick Kavanagh's latest project, his first novel, is not so stylistically influenced as one might think. Rather than plunging into boggy streams of consciousness, Kavanagh emulates Joyce's focus on style more than his actual stylistic techniques, resulting in an ornately wrought work with a commanding sense of place and experience...
Where the strength of Kavanagh's style is most evident in its ability to grapplewith this ambiguity--to name duplicity withsharp-shooter accuracy that gives weight to eachside and validity to contradiction. Refined by avocabulary that sends the reader scurrying for thedictionary both in attempt to reacquaint herselfwith nautical anatomy and with words of ratherstartling specificity, Gaff Topsails is notalways an easy book to read. Although Kavanagh'sintimate knowledge makes for description asaccurate and illuminating as his vocabulary,imbuing this description with creative imaginationdemands a heavy toll in effort. There is a chapterdevoted exclusively to the geological history ofthe Newfoundland...
...Although Kavanagh's ability to portray the samesubject from many perspectives is practicedthroughout the book, as each characters react tothe weather, the turn of the sea and the creakingiceberg in a different way, his skill is mosthoned in his discussion of the novel's mostpervasive subject; the Roman Catholic Church...