Word: novelled
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...strength and weakness of this striking work is that it reads like a crime novel. But its protagonist, Jay Carsey, at age 47 really was president of Charles County Community College in Maryland. And on May 19, 1982, days before commencement, he really did withdraw $28,000 from the bank, drive to the airport, mail several letters, down some vodkas and board a flight. One of the letters was a brief note of resignation. One was a short statement to his wife that he was leaving because he was a "physical and psychological disaster." A postcard, to a close friend...
That grisly episode (from Tony Hillerman's novel Talking God) is fictional, but it epitomizes the tensions in a dilemma that confronts curators, anthropologists and those Native Americans who angrily oppose them. To many scholars, and to much of the museum-going public, the Indian bones and burial artifacts are valuable clues to humanity's past. But to many Indians, these relics are sacred and the archaeologists who have appropriated them no better than grave robbers...
...novel also vividly portrays the experience of a modern immigrant, dipping into the violent world of illegal documents, desperation and dark beaches in Florida. "There are national airlines flying the world that do not appear in any directory... we are refugees and mercenaries and guest workers; you watch us sleeping in airport lounges; you watch us unwrapping the last of our native foods..." Mukherjee gives us a strong sense of this under-world, and also of the Indian culture Jyoti is escaping...
...English travel writers (who has also done some exploring of our America, in Old Glory, a fabulous journey down the Mississippi), Jonathan Raban, describes her earlier work as a "romance with America itself, its infinitely possible geography, its license, sexiness, and violence." The description clearly fits this new novel, and romance is a well-chosen word...
...NATURAL CURIOSITY by Margaret Drabble (Viking; $19.95). In a sequel to The Radiant Way (1987), the author offers a Victorian-style novel about some decidedly contemporary English women...