Word: schine
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Premise Based on best-selling novel by Cathleen Schine, this quaint little romantic mystery examines the ultimate question: how do you fall in love? Helen, the perfectly complacent, satisfied and divorced bookstore owner and mother receives a passionate, unsigned love letter. When she discovers its author is her college student employee, she tries to resist temptation...
...author of witty and mysterious curiosities, Cathleen Schine, takes an unexpected, wrong turn to the Galapagos Islands with The Evolution of Jane. The existential questioning of the protagonist, Jane Barlow Schwartz, is based on Charles Darwin's Origin of Species. With the additional layering and listing of the names of famous thinkers such as Freud, Marx and Nietzsche, Schine sets out to prove, as she stated in an interview, that she "is a pseudo-intellectual. And [she's] really good...
...there are moments when Schine shines. She gives an occasional revelation about self-knowledge and a meaningful insight about the ways woman bond--but these are scarce. Jane believes that Martha gives "a sort of glorious uniform of the soul, new and intricate and ever changing, which [she] could put on each morning without thinking or choosing, which [she] could wear all day and even at night and revel in the pleasure of the fabric against [her] skin, the swirl of the skirts, the elegant shape." These rare and vivid images are beautiful and show Schine's strength...
...when Schine returns to the cold, somewhat scientific pseudo-Darwinian logic that she falters. There is an insultingly blatant parallel between Darwin's theory of evolution and the evolution of Jane's friendships and identity. There is no mystery about this self-explanatory connection, but at last Schine introduces a secret family feud. However, the writing again makes any interest vanish. Throughout the novel, the rules of algebra and syllogism appear, "If A=(?) and B=(?), then all one has to prove is (?)." The logic is straightforward, giving the reader time for their own conclusions: if chapter 1=(heavy blinking...
...Schine leaves us with a paraphrased section of a biology text and a set of journal entries sparkling with banality. At one point, underdeveloped character aboard ship Gloria screams, "Blame it one the stars!" Perhaps they are the culprits. But fate aside, Freud, Marx and all of the jargon undermine Schine's witty prose. As Jane's mother tells her daughter, the reader might associate with the author: "You are a girl of conviction. I admire that...