Word: ogreishly
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...young woman from the country who attends a Romanian university. Over the course of the novel - it's narrated by one of her roommates - Lola is politically harassed and sexually traumatized, and finally she hangs herself. The title refers to the unripe plums that the city's ogreish police officers steal and eat as they roam the streets, in a display of brainless gluttony...
...formula to you? What these stories are reacting against is not so much fairy tales in general as the specific, saccharine Disney kind, which sanitized the far-darker originals. (As did Shrek, by the way. In the William Steig book, the ogre is way more brutal, scary and ... ogreish.) But the puncturing of the Disney style is in danger of becoming a cliché itself. The pattern--set up, then puncture, set up, then puncture--is so relentless that it inoculates the audience against being spellbound, training them to wait for the other shoe to drop whenever they see a moment...
...almost all the pages that follow, the yeasty old woman unpacks the rich and terrible secrets of her past, as a young girl in Shanghai growing up amid a plague of sorrows: how her own mother abandoned her and she was married off to an ogreish ne'er-do-well; how they hid in a monastery famous for dragon- well tea while the Japanese invaded Manchuria; how somehow she endured the war, losing friends and children along the way; and how, in the end, indomitable as pain, she escaped China and her husband just five days before the communist takeover...
...vulgarity is the hallmark of our greatness," says Styron, who lived for many years in Paris and whose books always sell well in France. "I don't necessarily mean to be derogatory. The Europeans have always been fascinated by wanting to know what's going on with this big, ogreish subcontinent across the Atlantic, this potentially dangerous, constantly mysterious country called the U.S. of A." American popular culture fills a vacuum, vulgar or not. "French television is a wasteland; ours is a madhouse. But at least it's vital," says Styron. "Dallas and Knots Landing and the American game shows...
...tribulations in this academic community go far beyond publish or perish. There is the oh-so-smooth college president who is scheming to become a political bigwig. There is the cuckolded football coach whose wanton wife is exchanging signals with the star quarterback. There is the ogreish dean who keeps his pristine daughter locked away in his gothic manse. Meanwhile, no one seems to be paying much attention to books, lectures, homework or grades. That is because Alden University exists only in a mythical grove called Soapland and in the mind of a woman who creates worlds that flicker...