Word: raul
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...often that a writer sees his main character as clearly and directly as Rafael Yglesias sees Raul, the precocious 14-year-old who bombs out of private school in this brief and crystalline first novel. The author avoids displays of virtuosity, the pleasures of romantic posturing, and all other possible uses of fiction except this one: to watch with great care a being who fascinates him. The steadiness and detachment of his view would be remarkable in any case, but are truly astonishing for a writer who was exactly 15 years old when he wrote the novel...
...Raul is a good subject, a tangle of immaturities held together by intelligence. He hides as much of the jumble as he can behind a pose that is half self-satire. The "Black Prince," as he calls himself in mockery, is a mannered, deadly literary duelist who slices fellow students and blundering adults into home fries with razor-edged misquotations. The Black Prince is a devilish smoker of cigarettes and a virgin, who is torn between self-disgust at this fault and contempt for the mawkishness of teen-age passion...
...novel begins, Raul sits in a beanery in The Bronx, near the Cabot School, wrapped in a satisfying combination of doom and glory. He is preparing to cut classes for the tenth straight day. Fascinated classmates crowd round to be recognized or snubbed, as black-princely honor requires. Expertly-he is practiced at this-Raul builds his mood from their reactions. He must have theater. Alec, a worldly friend, asks why Raul has dressed in black. "I'm in mourning for my life," he replies. "Who is that from?" asks Alec, a bit off balance. "Chekhov," says Raul...
...steamships, set up shop on the island with a 50,000-watt transmitter. Gibraltar, of course, was a CIA cover, and Radio Swan was soon booming propaganda to Fidel Castro's Cuba, 350 miles away. It called Castro and his lieutenants "pigs with beards" and accused Brother Raul Castro of being "a queer with effeminate friends." In reply, Havana Radio called Swan "a cage of hysterical parrots...
Threatened by Reform. In that atmosphere of shattered illusions, the Tupamaros were born. Raul Sendic, the movement's leader, who was arrested last week in Montevideo, started off by leading cane field workers on a march to the capital. Then he turned to more clandestine methods of harassing the government. The movement, now composed of perhaps 3,000 full-time activists, consists largely of youthful leftists from Uruguay's middle class, but it has also attracted murderous ideologues and common criminals...