Word: prentiss
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Locations such as 69 Prentiss Street, the Middlesex County Courthouse, and several Harvard Square spots, including Tommy's Lunch, may make their way into the film, said Blum...
...very first page of this very long novel about Ireland contains a reference to an unspecified night in June 1904, when "Patrick Prentiss came for the first time to Kilpeder and booked a room at the Arms." The time may be of little consequence to most readers, but some will not be able to ignore that, by coincidence or design, the author begins his plunge into Irish history with a suggestion of the most famous date in modern literature. That would be Bloomsday (June 16, 1904), the day of James Joyce's Ulysses...
...tweedy Prentiss does not make as splashy an entrance as Joyce's stately, plump Buck Mulligan in his yellow dressing gown, "bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed." Yet there is a strained relationship. Buck begins Joyce's stream of subversive epiphanies with a mockery of religious ritual, and Pat launches Thomas Flanagan's The Tenants of Time with a polite spoof on the rituals of orthodox history. Prentiss is a young Irish pedant, fresh out of New College, Oxford, and itching to write a book about a failed nationalist uprising...
...Prentiss's book never gets written, not because he lacks vision ("If . . . one could take a moment of history, a week, a month, and know it fully, perfectly, turn it in one's fingers until all the lights had played upon its surfaces . . .) but because the facts and mysteries he encounters exceed his intentions. Or so he claims. When a friend suggests that history is a form of narrative fiction, Prentiss replies a little too glibly that "a taste for fiction has always seemed to me the unfailing mark of an imaginative deficiency...
...size and sweep, The Tenants of Time is an intimate book, a narrative that constantly adds personal tones and shadings to "take a moment of history, a week, a month, and know it fully." Patrick Prentiss would envy this grand illusion, the best historical novel to be published in the U.S. since Thomas Flanagan's The Year of the French...