Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Anthropomorphizing the machine and denaturing the operator have the intended < effect, and there is no doubt that Carolyn Chute writes for effect. Her first novel, The Beans of Egypt, Maine, socked the reader with a collection of country characters that might have escaped the pages of another resident Maine novelist, Stephen King, who does not write nearly so well as Chute but plots better...
Welcome to Redbud, Andy and Elizabeth (Madolyn Smith). He hopes to write that big novel; she's looking for peace and quiet. Instead they find a snake in their living room, a corpse in the garden and a mailman who thinks he's Mad Max in a pickup truck. The deepest injury is to Andy's authorial ego, when his book turns out stinky and she writes next year's best seller. In Smith's bruised glare you can see the befuddled pain of anyone married to a blockhead with writer's block. But that's just subplot. The main...
...unsuitable, short-lived marriage. Since then, he has carefully constructed a hermetic existence designed to protect himself from all surprises. His plan works, until the morning he discovers a pigeon staring at him in the hallway outside his attic room. The protagonist of German Author Patrick Suskind's second novel seems as commonplace as the monstrous main character of his first, the international best seller Perfume (1986), was bizarre. Such appearances are deceiving. The Pigeon is a small, unassuming paradigm of psychological terror and comedy. With remarkable grace and compression, Suskind displays a life, dismantles it and then puts...
...simply a matter of aesthetics. Popping in a comma can be like slipping on the necklace that gives an outfit quiet elegance, or like catching the sound of running water that complements, as it completes, the silence of a Japanese landscape. When V.S. Naipaul, in his latest novel, writes, "He was a middle-aged man, with glasses," the first comma can seem a little precious. Yet it gives the description a spin, as well as a subtlety, that it otherwise lacks, and it shows that the glasses are not part of the middle-agedness, but something else...
...time the governess beholds the church, Australian Author Peter Carey's third novel has begun to build to a spectacular finish. But none of the surprises to come are any more outlandish than the trail of circumstances and coincidences that have led up to them. Like the glass structure it celebrates, Oscar and Lucinda seems the stuff of shimmering, transparent fantasy, held together by the struts of 19th century history and the mullions of painstaking detail. The book does not, of course, weigh twelve tons, but it will seem substantial enough to readers unable to put it down...