Word: metaphor
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...Russell Banks (HarperCollins; 390 pages; $22) tries hard to pass the novel off as the story of a Huck Finn-esque mall rat in upstate New York. Unfortunately, it was a lot easier to be an American archetype when Huck and Jim floated down the Mississippi, a ready-made metaphor. It's a much more difficult, and much less interesting, trick for Bone, the 14 year old narrator of this book, who's stuck not with a river but a mere shopping mall, a place whereTIME book critic John Skowsays "you can sort of float, but not too far, just...
...binding metaphor of 17th century still life was the vanitas, a term deriving from the text in Ecclesiastes, "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity." Such images were meant to show the fleeting nature of the world's goods, honors and sensual pleasures, setting them against the terrible perspective of death, time and judgment. They exemplified the desenga?o del mundo, "disillusionment of the world," that was one of the chief tropes of Spanish Baroque art and literature. They could be small and simple-three moldy skulls and a pocket watch-or fulsome in their cascade of lessons...
...mounds of form, bluntly placed against a background of no-space black, come out of the same sensibility that recorded the nameless piles of human bodies in The Disasters of War. This is the realization of the inevitability of death that the older vanitas paintings set out as metaphor, but here it is concrete and direct, inscribed in every molecule of sad flesh. One realizes that Goya could see and feel more death in some mutton than Rubens could put in a whole Crucifixion...
...paper off at a brisk clip, with a brief, but precise, justification of her topic: "Every dog must have its day: this thesis is about Rousseau's dog." "Kennedy goes on to explain her treatment of the poor creature, "By 'dog' I will mean, first, the dog as metaphor, the dog as such in Rousseau's thought. Second, there are Rousseau's actual dogs, of whom he was very fond...
...cast, a virtual ensemble of HRDC members, is capable of greater productions than this. Ill-fated by the script at its outset, The Living plunders a previous era for answers and comes up empty-handed except for a contrived ending metaphor. As Graunt puts in in his closing speech, "What Newton found [on vacation during the plague]: the world would fly to pieces, but for a great force, a power in every single body in the world, which pulls it ceaselessly toward every other body." Unfortunately, not even Newtonian physics can hold the play together...