Word: mightly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...might have trouble filling out the whole of this miniature allegory, but that's undoubtedly Barth in the corner, playing with his toy trains. The great conservative, the practitioner of a lost art, the bearer of the torch--so Barth justifies his extravagances...
...might notice that these characters don't write to each other at all. At different times their stories overlap, and by the end of Letters they're all related by marriage or adultery. But Barth's assumption of the epistolary novelist's cloak is a fiction: Letters shares nothing with models like Richardson's Clarissa...
...enamored of the language than of the signifying narration, and yet less enamored of the narration than of its formal arrangement, one need not necessarily imagine that artist therefore forsaking the world for language, language for the processes of narration, and those processes for the abstract possibilities of form. Might he/she not as readily, at least as possibly, be imagined as thereby (if only thereby) enabled to love the narrative through the form, the language through the narrative, even the world through the language...
...China's impact on the surrounding nations in a scant ten pages. Shaplen offers us a weak-kneed rationalization. To discuss the mainland, he insists, would require an entire book. But elsewhere, he eagerly tackles Japan in less than 100 pages and the Philipines in even fewer. While one might expect this--American reporters' access to the mainland has been extremely limited--it leaves a gaping hole. A Turning Wheel is subtitled "Three Decades of the Asian Revolution," but its author has omitted a discussion of the revolution that many believe has shaped the better part of the region...
...Turning Wheel degenerates into an encyclopedic rendition of facts and events. A tendency toward run-on sentences packed with references and acronyms may deter the novice. But if Shaplen has only written the encyclopedia of modern Asia, it is a reference work that is desperately needed. As one might expect, the author is at his best in relatively uncharted territory; the chapters on Burma, Malaysia and Indonesia are not only fascinating, but promise to fill gaps in most people's knowledge...