Word: owned
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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The weaving of different stories occurs more through curious echoes and cross-references than through comprehensible relations. Barth once again has his own defense ready in the words of Lady Amherst:
LIKE A LITERARY KRONOS, John Barth has stuffed each of his fictional offspring down his maw and let forth an echoing belch of a novel. The noise deafens; Barth blushes. With reason--many an atrocity litters Letters's past, including the authorial analogues of incest, cannibalism and flagellation. But what...
IF YOU LOOK only at the large strokes in Letters, however, another explanation for its size emerges, one more believable, more acceptable, though less flattering to Barth. Each of his correspondents either relives or believes he is reliving a portion of his past life. Lady Amherst echoing Samuel Johnson, calls...
Barth is least of all an idiot, and this schema for each of his characters obviously governs his own writing of Letters--this novel that incorporates each of his past protagonists, that takes every one of his old plots and recycles it, that is engaged in eternal omphaloskepsis, a sort...
Reviewing Shaplen's book is like reviewing 11 books: each chapter has a life of its own. On the Philippines. Shaplen is obsessed with Marcos; on Indonesia, he relies too heavily on economic figures rather than trends and on Korea, his history is hackneyed. But Shaplen surprises you when you...