Word: poe
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...rare moments, the book is even fascinating. The love letters of Marx, Napoleon and Poe, as well as Flaubert's descriptions of Egyptian dancing girls, are worth reading even beyond their titillation value. The excerpts from Walt Whitman's diary, in which he berates himself for his homosexual longings--"Depress the adhesive [i.e. homosexual] nature/It is in excess, making life a torment/all this diseased, feverish disproportionate adhesiveness..."--are almost as beautiful as his poetry...
...Waterworks by E.L. Doctorow (Random House). This Poe-esque tale of murky doings in 1871 Manhattan offers the surreptitious exhumation of a corpse / while, sure enough, fog swirls in the phosphorescent light of early dawn. What it can't supply, for all the author's huffing and puffing, is social significance. But with a ghostly white stagecoach whose passengers are supposedly deceased rich men, significance (which closes on Saturday night anyway) shouldn't be an issue...
Nevertheless, the museum, while graceful, elegant and pedagogical, is a freak show -- a kind of Nightmare on Elm Street as scripted by Edgar Allan Poe. There is the Soap Lady, who, underground and buried, decomposed into a waxy gray substance called adipocere; she was purchased by the museum for $7.50 when Philadelphia's old cemetery was moved in 1875. Then there is the pair of twins who share a single skull; the Frenchwoman who grew horny protrusions all over her body, including her forehead (top left); a heart made translucent by chemicals; the constipation-racked colon of the Balloon...
...believe The Crimson owes Rita Hauser, and us, a little more credit than that. --Tracy N. Poe Beatrice Chiplatt Nancy Puccinelli Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
This claim is asserted but never convincingly shown. The shocking, Poe-like tale at the center of the novel does not achieve the emblematic significance that Doctorow wishes it to have. It is simply too bizarre to stand for -- or comment on -- anything outside itself, particularly the entire City of New York and what McIlvaine calls its "roiling soul, twisting and turning over on itself, forming and re-forming ..." The Waterworks is at its best when Doctorow stops McIlvaine's huffing and puffing about social significance and lets him get on with the business of telling an entertaining and sometimes...