Word: paines
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Finance Ministry in 1962, Sanz proposed the toughest austerity program in Colombia's history. He slapped an export tax on coffee, a 20% surcharge on personal and corporate income taxes, even pushed through higher taxes on beer, races, lotteries and gasoline. Rich and poor alike bellowed with pain. But Colombia expects to balance its budget by next year, and international bankers back what one of them called "the greatest tax reform in Latin America." Sanz will now have an important if slim chance to work some reforms on a broader scale...
Aiken's virtue as a novelist is not the way he writes, but the way he sees. Durrell has asked, "What is life but the way we interpret the silences around us?" Aiken interprets the silences of our lives and compels us to feel their pain. "Psychological novel" would be the term to describe the type of book Aiken writes, but no academic categorization or paraphrase can capture the poignancy and depth of his perception...
Again and again Aiken's novels echo the idea that love means pain, although his heroes still invariably heed the call of the Sirens. Why the love-pain equation? Like the lovers in Blue Voyage, we are unable to communicate, and must therefore bottle up our desires and the things we want to say. But what if the perfect communication were achieved? "What if it were at last possible to talk of everything with a woman? To keep no secrets, no dark recesses of the mind, no dolors and dunks, which could not be shared with her? But then...
Although in Conversation this sort of temporary isolation saves a faltering marriage, Aiken points out that to isolate ourselves within the shell of the ego is no way to avoid pain. In King Coffin, Jasper Ammans, a young, insane intellectual who lives on Plympton Street in Cambridge, walls himself up within himself; he decides to kill a total stranger--"the final action by which he would have set the seal on his complete freedom." Ammans observes and analyzes his victim, Jones, so intensely that Jones' life, Jones' frustrations, Jones' pains become Ammans' own pain--and self-destruction. Involvement with others...
Thus all the exits are closed. Communication, lack of communication, love, isolation--all lead to pain...