Word: peasants
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...plucky dreamer who left her provincial sweet-potato-farming village in south China for the distant capital at the age of 17. Her youth, she tells us in the novel's first lines, began several years and odd jobs after that, when she finally succeeded in parting from her "peasant" mentality and realizing that some of the modern, shiny things in life "might possibly...
...open on his lap. Roxana hovered by his chair or knelt at his feet. Frederick liked absently to stroke her golden hair, and sometimes when the text was especially gripping he would prop his elbow on her convenient, shelf-like bosom.As the Russian mystic described the life of a peasant in the fields, Frederick lost himself in a visions of cut grass and open skies. His scythe mowed down the green in big, easy arcs. His body was slick with sweat, but he did not tire. His very being had been swept up in some great external force. The only...
...Among the migrants is Deeti, a resolute and resourceful peasant woman who flouts conventions of caste and presciently foretells the coming of the tall-masted ship that will reshape her destiny. Sitting in his Kolkata home, Ghosh describes her to TIME as the book's "mainsail, its guiding energy." But while Deeti drives a story of considerable scope, she's not alone. Ghosh has a talent - revealed not only in this novel but previous ones - for bringing to life through his characters worlds that have been long forgotten. We meet, among others, a freed American slave, an impeccably-mannered Bengali...
...Karadzic was an unlikely character to play on the historical stage. A peasant's son who never felt fully at ease in Sarajevo, he was an unsuccessful psychiatrist and a dismal poet. He made his feelings about the city clear, first in verse when he wrote a stanza that read "Let's go down to the cities to kill the scumbags," and later when he decamped to the hills around Sarajevo to oversee the shelling of its civilians. In one typically pompous display, he unveiled to a room of sycophants a Styrofoam mock-up of a "New Sarajevo" that...
...currently chic for fancy novelists to slum it in the lower genres, the way Marie Antoinette used to dress up as a peasant and milk cows. Sebastian Faulks just wrote a James Bond novel; Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union was a noir mystery set in an alternate universe. Some writers find the discipline invigorating: look at The Road, Cormac McCarthy's fling with apocalyptic science fiction. Some don't: Martin Amis' Night Train was an undercooked attempt at hard-boiled detective fiction. It turns out that trashy books are as hard to write as good ones...