Word: prose
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...scarred legs and bodily worms abound. But his frankness, perhaps the book’s most noteworthy quality, permits the often-comic process of learning to temper the bleak surroundings he sometimes faces. We watch his evolution through adolescence, transmitted in extremely spare formulations that one hesitates to call prose. It might be a good time to again call attention to the title; Hoffmann offers succinct summations, highlighting the most important images as the narrator perceived them, not in the way that the form of the conventional novel dictates. Each sentence (only one or two of which will ever dwell...
...translated from the Spanish by Alfred MacAdam, does indeed offer a unique scientific analysis of human behavior and a character list ample enough to facilitate countless love stories. But while Volpi’s literary conceit is ambitious enough, and his ideas occasionally intriguing, his hackneyed prose and contrived analysis diminish his message. Volpi’s account of the shocking socio-political events of the late 20th century percolates through the narrative of Yuri Chernishevsky, whose enigmatic past is gradually unmasked, revealing uncanny links to other characters halfway around the world. Yuri is the common thread among three women...
...central Sardinia last month, I had a chance to feel the public's dissatisfaction with what was on offer. During a panel on the media, when I observed that Italian journalists seem to write mostly for each other, for politicians, or for the pleasure of reading their own prose, the audience clapped its approval. For much of the following hour, questioners demanded to know why the news wasn't being written for them...
...Most were maimed. Lepers with truncated arms and legs were a common sight; but even more numerous than the lepers were victims of severe bone malformation, the result of calcium deficiency. This affliction ravages the human frame, reducing it to tangled wreckage of atrophied limbs.”The prose is not merely precise but elegant and memorable, full of acerbic wit and unusual metaphor. The writing illuminates not only the landscape and the people in general, but also a succession of unforgettable characters that illustrate the range of issues confronting modern Africa. One essentially tragicomic figure is the Sikh...
...heavyweight in Latin America, associated with the prolific Boom period of the 60s and 70s—wrote “Hopscotch” in 1963, after his move to France to escape dictator Juan Domingo Perón, and its Left Bank influences are clear. In stunningly tactile prose, the novel follows pseudo-autobiographical protagonist Horacio Oliveira, also an Argentinean expatriate, through his nights of jazz, cigarette smoke, and intellectual conversation in Paris with a group of friends dubbed the “Serpent Club...