Word: reader
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...BRAZILIAN AUTHOR Ivan Angelo did not get bored with and laugh at his own words, their oppressiveness would send even the most patient reader scrambling for freedom and sanity. Laughter is, in fact, the reader's only means of warding off the cold, crushing force of the five interwoven tales of Angelo's recently translated book, The Tower of Glass...
Strangely these stories do not bear down on the reader with the weight of their brutal sex and violence; rather it is Angelo's stylistic violence that is almost unbearable. The graphic, crude rape of Bete, a prostitute, and the torture and murder of five men innocently drinking at the local bar stand out almost as welcome reference points in a mass of words that create--and then ignore--these scenes of horror...
Angelo's words are only bearable when they accept responsibility for the creation of a narrative event--be it memories of masturbation or a teenager buying his first pair of pyjamas. When these infrequent reference points do emerge, they last only long enough for the reader to make a desperate grab at gaining understanding of Angelo's fiction before the memory fades or the reader--absorbed in the tales--chances upon a boy full of lead, upon more of the author's stylistic violence...
...Conquest" generates a potpourri of unstable images and dumps them disinterestedly on the reader's lap. The tale "Friday Night/Saturday Morning" continues with this lack of concern, though with more violent images. It stars four men who act as a death squad randomly mutilating strangers just for the hell of it. Clinical descriptions of gunshot wounds mingle with the grief of victims' relatives...
...time the reader reaches "The Real Son of The Bitch," the text has settled into a more conventional mode as it fairly faithfully follows the thoughts and desperation of a prostitute. The words settle into calmer sequences and the characters hold onto their initial identities. This narrative that has finally found its own internal logic grows stronger in the fourth and last tales, "The Tower of Glass" and "Lost and Found." The text reasserts its power, but uses the power to defy and oppress the reader rather than to transmit the author's ideas...