Word: reader
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Such structural underpinning helps the writer more than the reader. For all his fascination with the theories of Einstein and Freud, with the fragmenting of personality and time, Durrell fortunately remains a devotee of Scheherazade. Livia stands comfortably on its own as a polished romance filled with bright, interesting characters. They gather in the 1930s at Avignon, home of the medieval and mysterious Knights Templars. The air is "full of the scent of lemons and mandarines and honeysuckle" and of something else: dread of the future that Hitler is planning across the border in Germany. Durrell is still prone...
...German and Soviet causes. Contradiction is the order of the day: "How do you explain that?" inquires a woman. "?Dios mio! The people who destroy holy images kiss them." On the left, a father and son have their own civil war and lead separate socialist organizations. Yet throughout, the reader is struck by the dignity and character of ordinary people who endured and prevailed. Theirs is the Blood of Spain, and their total recall is more valuable than any number of academic speculations. The death of Generalissimo Franco has loosened tongues. Doubtless, many new volumes on the Civil War will...
...moving the parts of his body. He rolled on wheels, pulled by a string." Ehrlichman dwells too much on describing the furnishings of the capital's most notable drawing rooms, apparently in search of credentials as a serious novelist. Yet he knows Washington intimately enough to lure the reader along, even into that "double bed" above the Attorney General's office, which had been "the historic scene of demanding if unofficial activities of Smythe's predecessors, their high-ranking brothers and sundry surrogates." Yes, the rumored past meshes readily with the fictional future as Ehrlichman...
When the actions of adults are seen through the eyes of children, irony is the usual result. The child misinterprets, but the reader understands. So seems the situation in Only Children, in which a couple of nine-year-old girls watch their parents misbehave over a long country weekend...
...this seems like an eschatological Upstairs, Downstairs, with the damned as underprivileged and God as absentee slumlord, let the reader be assured that Elkin's Heaven and Hell are mainly framework. Unlike his other novels, centrifuges of virtuosity, The Living End is tightly structured, with a beginning, a middle and a sudden, inevitable...