Word: rueful
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...That is a lot of evens, evened out by an unexpected development, which is that the two main characters actually come to life and play a convincing love story. Clementine is charming but alarming, like most Presidents, and Guy, a writer blocked by prudence and the Secret Service, is rueful and funny. He successfully conveys his secret to the reader: why First Ladies' portraits look that way -- why Abigail Powers Fillmore, for instance, "looks like she has just been induced, for the good of the nation, to eat a dozen mud pies...
Rossi has a reputation, not altogether undeserved, for rueful, chilly buildings. Until the past decade, he was widely known for a cemetery in Modena, Italy, that was started in 1971. The complex is dignified, with utterly no attempt to prettify or embellish. One of its main features, a 2,625-ft.-long, colonnaded, concrete arcade, achieves serenity by way of severity. His 1976 school in the town of Fagnano was a similarly stripped-down collection of elemental components. Yet, as if to confound those who would pigeonhole him as a weltschmerzy ascetic, Rossi took the opposite tack for a family...
...beings learning life's painful lessons. The affections on display include the parental, filial and fraternal; but the emphasis is on the romantic, which takes place mostly between partners of unlike ages and is presented as primarily a process of teaching. Events are often melodramatic, but the tone is rueful and autumnal. From the opening moment, a tearstained flashback, love is treated, to use phrases from the score, as a "happy moment" rather than the "journey of a lifetime...