Word: novelness
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...agreement. First, it's important to understand that today's framework does not state that China and other developing nations should have no emissions limits ever. It says that such countries should be compensated if they set limits. This is quite different, and opens up the way for a novel agreement that would allow both Washington and Beijing to move simultaneously to break the diplomatic logjam over emissions reductions and to save face with their domestic constituencies...
...bits and bytes flowing through it, this is not a particularly electrifying setup. Any novel about a rock star must first get past the ekphrastic nightmare of trying to describe music with prose. But more than that, this is a novel about people who have wasted massive chunks of their lives--Duncan in sterile rock-critic hermeneutics (he's like the worst-case-scenario future of Rob Fleming from High Fidelity); Annie in a dead romance and a dead-end job; and Crowe in sulky, creatively arid seclusion. They're trying to make the best of what's left...
Hornby's name appears on the front cover of the British edition of Moore's novel A Gate at the Stairs (Knopf; 336 pages), her first since Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? in 1994. It's rare that a blurb escapes from its usual station on the back cover of a book, but if Hornby ever called me the best American writer of my generation, I'd tattoo it on my forehead...
...should make a disclosure before I review Audrey Niffenegger's new novel, which is that I'm an identical twin. I didn't have anything to disclose with her previous novel, The Time Traveler's Wife, because even after numerous attempts I have not yet successfully traveled in time. But Her Fearful Symmetry (Scribner; 406 pages) is about a pair of identical twins, Julia and Valentina, whose mother and aunt, Edwina and Elspeth, are also identical twins...
...twins, the crossword-composing, obsessive-compulsive classicist upstairs--is fashioned with such twiddly bespoke neatness, such fussy perfection, that the whole affair is like a tragedy performed by exquisite dolls: lovely and precious and lifeless. Only the spectral Elspeth feels real. And what does it say about a novel that the one character who feels alive is a ghost...