Word: petrus
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...refuses to make the hollow gesture of publishing an apology to maintain his position at the university. Aimless after his resignation, he decides to visit his daughter Lucy. She lives by herself on an isolated smallholding in the Eastern Cape that she shares with a black farmer, Petrus, in a farmhouse that previously housed a hippie commune to which she belonged. David and Lucys relationship is cordial but distant, and her choice to live off the land seems to be a calculated rejection of his intellectual, urban life. Her decision is informed by a refusal to live her life according...
...Petrus, who in the old days of apartheid would have been called boy even as a middle aged man and relegated to the ranks of simple farmhands, is the farms co-proprietor and a man of substance in the local black community. Lurie is unsure how to relate to Petrus: at first he seems determined to like him, the politically correct thing to do in the situation. But a shockingly violent incident involving Lucy changes everything. Suddenly Lurie is doubly disgracedfor his failure as a father to help his own daughter and for his abuse of the child-like student...
...While Coetzee develops brilliantly the white characters in the novel, there is something disturbing about the one dimensionality of all of the black characters. Petrus in particular never becomes anything more than a stereotype of the newly empowered yet still angry black man, and the seeming shallowness of his value system is chilling. Yet perhaps Coetzee keeps Petrus at a distance to make us realize that despite Lucy and David's liberal attitudes to the new South Africa, the damage done by years of oppression will not just disappear. And they will not be spared the revenge...
...surfing, a new digital videodisc player that shows films in eight different languages and a headset for exploring the make-believe world of virtual reality. "Thirty years ago, we were the first hotel to have color TVs in all the guest rooms," says hotel managing director Jim Petrus. "Now we're redefining state...
...ounces of Beluga caviar (Table water crackers, $3 per box), or 98.33 ounces of fois gras pate with truffles, or prepare something for yourself with 20 French truffles ($50 per 1-oz. truffle). Wash it all down with the popular $700-per-bottle special-order Chateau Petrus 1985 (red), all from Cardullo's, 6 Brattle Street...