Word: novels
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Jersey noodle factory in 1947 for $3.5 million. After receiving millions in profits over the years from the sale of spaghetti and macaroni, the school sold the company for $115 million in 1976. That may be the only use of pasta to finance higher education, but other novel strategies for coping with the fiscal crunch have yeasted up all over. Among them...
Thus begins this daring and unusually complex first novel, part psychological thriller (Can Al reach his friend?), part mystery (What happened to Birdy?). It is also an extended memoir of growing up poor in the 1930s, a detailed portrait of a friendship as firm as it is unlikely and an utterly plausible account of an unbelievable obsession. In classical mythology, Daedalus made wings for a practical reason, so that he and his son could escape the labyrinth. Birdy, it turns out, has built wings too, but craved much more. In his cage, he remembers: "I'm also finding...
...sign of the novel's success is the fact that Birdy's desire never for an instant seems risible or even, after a while, particularly bizarre. Thoughts from the hero ("What I need is a tail") that could easily be howlers pass by with the equilibrium of logic and consistency. Method triumphs over madness. In alternating sections, Al reminisces aloud, as much to pass the time as to get through to his apparently oblivious friend, and then Birdy in turn thinks about his past. These two sets of memories are vectors to the present. The personalities...
...Manual, like Hopscotch, is a novel of spiritual exile. In A Manual, Hopscotch's beat Left Bank "Club" graduates to the counterculture "Screwery" which is more preoccupied with politics than with Zen and jazz. Different from those of the "Club," the "Screwery's" members do not cut themselves off from mankind, but desire society's upheaval. They have found a purpose to life: "To change reality for everyone...everyone is (ought to be) what I am...to meld the real with mankind...there is only duty and that's to find the true course. Method: revolution...
DOES CORTAZAR BELIEVE in what his exiled rebels are striving towards? One thinks not. He prefaces his novel with an indictment of Argentine military rule and a call to socialism, but he is too sophisticated to believe his characters' irresponsible lifestyle can save their nation. They lack a coherent ideology or strategy, and their leisurely french fries and ontological arguments are too removed from Argentine realities; they never discuss the country's brutal regime and economic inequalities. They experience revolutionary movements solely through newspaper clippings. Like the spiritually ship-wrecked "Club," each member of the "Screwery" struggles more with...