Word: rome
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Delicate Truce. For the short term, Andreotti needs the Communists, reported TIME's Rome bureau chief Jordan Bonfante last week, and the Premier is convinced that for the moment at least, they intend to act responsibly and without their usual revolutionary deviousness. But Andreotti is limiting the relationship to parliamentary cooperation; he has turned down a suggestion by Communist Leader Enrico Berlinguer for a round table of major parties to draw up economic policy. In the longer term, the Premier believes Euro-Communists should be encouraged to follow democratic procedures not so much within national governments...
Before leaving Rome, Andreotti discussed his concerns in an interview with Bonfante. While admitting that the economic crisis was severe, the Premier was faintly optimistic. "Some of the capital that fled abroad has returned, and there is a much greater awareness than there was a year ago that we have to face up to the crisis. The balance of payments used to be regarded as a problem for technicians. Today people understand that it bears on the price of meat at the butcher in the morning...
Complications arise in Paola's absence he wants to employ: he careens between badly Beard's deceased wife Leonora starts telephoning him from England. She complains that he has forsaken her, that he has been duped by the doctors and that she, very much alive, is now coming to Rome. Beard is forced to cope with his guilt; he wonders if, like many widowers he is secretly happy to exchange an old wife for a young lover. After all, he asks, how much great literature has been created by widowers bemoaning the loss of their wife? (Burgess...
Still worse, Burgess cannot decide what style handled black humor and lyric descriptions of Rome in the fading twilight. The dialogue is virtually indefensible on any level, except perhaps that it befits Burgess' protagonist the hack screen writer (who talks like his scripts), but that defense falters, for it can't encompass all the other characters...
Beard's Roman Women is a rarity in that very few novels are illustrated (John Gardner's Sunlight Dialogues springs to mind as another exception). Interspersed throughout the book are clusters of photographs of Rome: rain beading on a window, sepia-colored church steeples; Roman street life, a few statues. While pleasant enough to look at, David Robinson's prints are sacrificed to a lost cause. Beard's Roman Women will not be saved by a handful of prints, whether Robinson's or Holbein's, for it is a shallow and poorly written exercise by a novelist...