Word: self
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Rachel Kennedy, 32, is a working partner in a London bookshop. She lives alone in a snug flat over the store. She is astute, self-sufficient and discreet. Occasionally, when the mood is on her, Rachel goes cruising, though she puts the matter even less romantically: "I go out, seek companions, bear them home . . . No bourgeois sentiments for me, no noble passions." Elsewhere, Anita Brookner's questionable heroine pitches her case more strongly: "I had resolved at a very early stage never to be reduced to any form of emotional beggary, never to plead, never to impose guilt, and never...
Heather, needless to say, goes off to the arms of her handsome illusion. Rachel retreats to her solitary world, where she will undoubtedly continue to practice self-deception about what is real. And Author Brookner? She can take a small bow for her own skillfully executed illusion...
...riches of El Dorado, Medellin has long been Colombia's main industrial center. On windless days, the skyline is smothered in smog, and a blue haze of pollution drifts upward into the Andes. Medellin-born Fernando Botero, probably Latin America's most renowned contemporary artist, captures the city's self-assuredness in his exaggerated canvases of local life, several of which hang in the Medellin museum. The pinched mouths and tiny noses of Botero's overfed men and women suggest the provincial smugness of an entrepreneurial society that honors the self-made...
...something that we do not like. Either that, or to blurt out some whiny silliness as Woody Allen did on the New York Times op-ed page in January, detailing a comedian's personal distress over a complicated international tragedy. Allen's plaint encouraged equally irrelevant counteraccusations of Jewish self-hate but this time did not reinstate the old cautionary mode. Unswervingly pro-Israel publications such as the New Republic, several Jewish organizations, 30 U.S. Senators sympathetic to Israel and last week President Reagan have expressed their impatience with Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir's hardheadedness. People seem to be catching...
David Silver, as the diarist narrator, with his sheared hair, unshaven face and ripped pajamas, appears a convincing lunatic. Moreover, he delivers his many long monologues with the curious self-absorption of a madman, drawing the audience into his twisted world where dogs write letters, the earth is crashing into the moon and a Russian bureaucrat can discover that he's actually the king of Spain. As he loses himself more and more in his delusions, the real pain behind his situation becomes clear, and the audience realizes that class boundaries separate him forever from the general's daughter with...