Word: perdita
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...fair, many of the plot problems are no fault of librettist and lyricist Randy Weiner ’87-’88. Shakespeare’s play is inherently flawed, from its undeserved redemption of Leontes (here, Ezekiel) to the dull romance between Perdita and Florizel (now Rain and Tariq). However, in his adaptation, Weiner makes no attempt to remedy any of the source story’s faults. Instead, he offers pat lines that tackily acknowledge the tale’s weaknesses. While these little fixes are cloyingly cute, they hardly improve upon the story; in fact, they...
...Perth-based writer's Sorry (Vintage; 218 pages). Just as Sixty Lights segued seamlessly into Dreams, this pained, poetic tale of a young girl wracked by dreams of speaking seems to have been born from its predecessor. "We take it for granted, don't we?" muses 12-year-old Perdita Keene, a free spirit made mute by the violent death of her English anthropologist father near Broome, Western Australia, in World War II. "The inspiration and expiration that presses the vocal folds, the movement of air from the trachea, the vibration of the voice box, the issuing-unthinking, automatic...
...novel gives voice to a girl's tentative coming of age. But just as powerfully, it addresses the dilemma of inhabiting, spiritually as well as spatially, the vast continent of Australia. The daughter of Shakespeare-obsessed Stella, and named after Hermione's abandoned daughter from The Winter's Tale, Perdita can't reconcile the vast Outback landscape of her childhood with the transported English culture of her schooling-"all this life, all this huge unelaborated life, told her there was more on heaven and earth than was dreamt of by Mister Shakespeare." Neglected by her self-absorbed parents, Perdita befriends...
...Jones is quick to shatter this glasshouse of cultural cross-pollination. When Mary becomes the scapegoat following the murder of Perdita's father and is banished to reform school in Perth, Sorry begins to articulate the deep unease of a family faced with the unfinished business of history. And it is around the grisly events that took place in the kitchen of the Keenes' cattle- station shack that the novel cinematically circles...
...Later, Stella will descend into misanthropic madness in a Perth boarding house, while Perdita, starved of her sisterhood with Mary, will seek out "the families of readership" as a trainee librarian. With a mastery of mise-en-sc?ne, Jones writes of the family's future as if it were the past, and the past as if it were the present. For the surviving members, what happened in the station's kitchen continues to play out, not unlike the true-life case of a Japanese soldier lost for 29 years in the Philippines jungles, who refused to believe World...