Word: renata
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SPEEDBOAT by Renata Adler. This sequence of polished vignettes ticks off a range of contemporary neuroses, especially those plaguing people in their 30s-the generation that was too young to cheer the System and too old to blow...
...RENATA ADLER'S SPEEDBOAT is less a novel in the conventional sense than a series of journalistic sketches of contemporary life. The anecdotes and scraps of dialogue that make up the book are loosely linked by the device of a first-person narrator, but the storyteller offers so little commentary on her material that we develop only a vague awareness of her personality. The narrator's carefully maintained neutrality works largely to good effect in Speedboat. It saves the book from let-me-tell-you-what-it's-all-about pretentiousness. Adler presents a catalogue of images and events...
...Gianandrea Gavazzeni, 67, whose 50 years at Milan's La Scala include associations with Toscanini, Mascagni and Giordano. Gavazzeni led a performance that was full of controlled excitement; at the same time, he was consistently thoughtful of his singers. His support of Veteran Soprano Renata Scot to (Leonora), who sang the precarious D 'amor sull 'ali rosee in Act IV with extreme caution, was a memorable lesson in podium gallantry...
...Yorker Journalist Renata Adler's special purview has often been the odd schizophrenia induced in those Americans who came of age (as she did) in the 1950s-a generation that was too young to cheer the System and too old to blow it up. The seven stories in Speedboat, though cast as fiction, really form an extended reporter's notebook on the same story: the many ways that agreeable, hypereducated people find to go slowly bonkers...
Fain or no Fain, the author of that sentence is Renata Adler. Who else could hide a land mine under well-tended prose with quite as much apparent innocence? It takes a second or two to realize that intellectuals have been exempted from the frantic metamorphoses demanded by modern life. Why? The answer comes in bits and pieces: anyone who accepts (or demands) the label intellectual is automatically too dumb to deserve it. To prove the point, Adler puts her heroine through a year of teaching, "by mistake," at a Manhattan college, surrounded by "feather bedding illiterates" and "reactionary pedants...