Word: men
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Thoughtfully, Hermann takes out an insurance policy. As it happens, he has met a poor carnival worker who seems to him to be his exact double, though in fact - and Nabokov's smile can be discerned here - there is no resemblance between the two men. Undeterred by reality and convinced that fate has handed him a chance at the perfect crime, Hermann changes clothes with the fellow, then shoots him, intending to collect on the in surance policy through his wife and live blissfully ever after...
...spoke of him in his presence as "the Important One." Naturally, the boy grew into a man thoroughly confused about his sex and spectacularly bumbling at practical affairs. He was 30 and the author of three respected novels before he gained a clear idea of how men and women actually perform intercourse. He was uncoordinated, ineffectual and absentminded. "I never saw anybody so incapable," his mother once said, as if admiring her handiwork. In his 20s, Forster astounded a friend by stating his belief that telephone wires were hollow...
...introduction to his collected stories John Cheever recalls a crusty, idiosyncratic editor at The New Yorker. But, adds the author, "since the men he encouraged ranged as widely as Irwin Shaw and Vladimir Nabokov, he seems to have done more good than anything else." Cheever may be the only person in the world who would mention these writers in the same sentence. There are many who would not mention Shaw at all. Alfred Kazin's massive study of American fiction, On Native Grounds, has no room for the author. Edmund Wilson's definitive survey, Classics and Commercials, gives...
...says simply, "a product of my times." Shaw spent five decades writing big movies and novels (The Young Lions, Lucy Crown) and unprofitable short fiction, because "in a novel or a play you must be a whole man. In a collection of stories you can be all the men or fragments of men, worthy and unworthy, who in different seasons abound in you. It is a luxury not to be scorned...
...finished his book in 1972, when the oppressive and ineffective General Alejandro Lanusse was President. A note to the American reader says that conditions under the present military government of General Jorge Videla are just as bad. This may be true, but it seems somewhat disingenuous not to have men tioned that between Lanusse and Videla was another leader of some notoriety. His name was Juan Perdn, and his two reigns covered some ten years (1946-55, 1973-74). His second coming lasted just one year. Then he died, leaving the country to his wife Isabelita, and to chaos. During...