Word: reader
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...vengeful postwar period, when Resistance members continued the battle, taking their turn at torturing and executing collaborators. No recent memoir has evoked the 1940s in France so eloquently or paid such close attention to suffering and emotional numbness. The diarist spares no one, neither the victims, the victors, the reader nor herself...
...lure worked. After decades of silence, Leitch arranged to meet a reader named Truda, in Liverpool: "Recognition was total, instantaneous. Her expression revealed a moment of fear so acute it was like a pain." Like many other adopted children, her son had his own fears. Were his own flaws environmental, or were they "symbolic perhaps of a greater human carelessness which would forever tie me to my mother's defection...
...pair in their indifference to all of the above. It is the adulterers who are incompatible, an irony at once deliciously comic and far too tidy. When the lovers finally sneak off to an idyllic week in a Vermont cottage, subsisting on passion and toasted cheese in bed, the reader feels the burned crumbs far more palpably than what Billy, in her carefully bored monotone, calls "the rapturous consummation." Frank concludes, "Were we to cohabit, I believe I would be driven nuts and she would come to loathe me." By contrast, marriage looks positively seductive. Were this antic reversal...
...moral corruption that goes unnoticed by police, schemes and counterschemes for revenge, deluded invocations to chivalry and honor among thieves. The end game is enlivened by Freudian twists, but the greatest strengths are Gores' skillful crosscutting, swift pace and mastery of tone. Because his breakneck intensity never falters, the reader is unlikely to pause and notice the implausibilities of the plot...
...community has talking days every Sunday and major saints' feast days. On those days, the monks talk at one meal and have a reader at the other, while on Sundays, they converse during both lunch and dinner. In another blow to the monastic stereotype, readings aren't quite what you'd expect. "We read the autobiography of Anna Russell the other week. Very racy," says Father Dalby, who at age 86 is one of the senior members of the community. "Sometimes we have a more spiritual book, like some of the writings of Thomas Merton," he adds...