Word: letting
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Writing in the first person, Starbuck tells us a story that is a pitifully amusing parody of the John Dean-H.R. Haldeman "Let's Make Money Off of Watergate" autobiographies. And somehow, Vonnegut manages to work in some particularly cogent statements about the mistreatment of Sacco and Vanzetti and the history and problems of the twentieth-century labor movement in general...
...with all its symbolic richness. Reading this book is almost like plowing through about 400 pages of poetry, too-as difficult and rewarding. Gordimer's structure demands ingenuity and patience. It's choppy--long descriptions interspersed with telegraphic bits of interior monologue and haphazard conversation. She switches perspectives to let Rosa explain how she sees herself and how she believes others see her. The reader has to fit it all together, compose a life out of these poetic fragments...
LIKE A LITERARY KRONOS, John Barth has stuffed each of his fictional offspring down his maw and let forth an echoing belch of a novel. The noise deafens; Barth blushes. With reason--many an atrocity litters Letters's past, including the authorial analogues of incest, cannibalism and flagellation. But what Barth does in the privacy of his own imagination is his own business; the worst atrocity he reserves for the hapless reader. The siren call of Barth's in-souciance, his cleverness, his recklessness, beckons you towards a grinding crash on the rocks surrounding these 750 pages, and a lonely...
Letters asks to be encapsulated, begs you for a precis on hind paws. Better, though, to let Barth himself summarize his beast...
There is, of course, the possibility of failure in anything...But the bees never let themselves fall into reveries of worry and speculation on their fortune. Instead, they conduct their affairs with confidence and optimism...