Word: senora
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Consider This, Senora...
...tiny watercolor Mexican town huddles beneath pastel pink and purple mountains on the dustjacket of Harriet Doerr's new novel, Consider This, Senora. An azure bubble of a church dome, crimson and cream splashes of title roofing and whitewashed walls merge in a hazy dreamscape technicolor. The cover seems to promise a self-indulgent, romanticized odyssey into a picture perfect landscape. But the text within reveals nothing of the sort: Doerr's crisp, pacific prose never lapses into kitsch other-worldliness in this captivating portrait of gringos in small-town Mexico...
Doerr does more than regurgitate her past triumphs, however. While Stones for Ibarra examined an American couple forging new lives for themselves abroad, Consider This, Senora tells of four Yanquis living aloof from their Mexican surroundings. Rather than engage with their new land, the protagonists live apart, their Mexican adventure just a hiatus in the larger scheme. For them, Mexico is not a country in its own right, but an absence or escape from their former lives...
...romanticism of the remote foreign hamlet. Loomis, the only involuntary member of the community, alone succeeds in forging a bright future in this brave new world. The others mentally reconstruct Amapolas to match the painting on the book's cover. The local grandee cautions his guest: "Consider this, senora. You are transforming Amapolas into something more beautiful than...
Velasquez makes Zurbaran look primitive. One senses this even in Zurbaran's most ambitious work, the immense altarpiece he did in 1638-40 for the ) Monastery of Nuestra Senora de la Defension in Jerez, the majority of whose surviving parts -- scattered long ago among museums in America, Spain, France and Scotland -- have been reunited for the first time, in the Met, for this show. Its most beautiful panels, The Adoration of the Magi and The Circumcision, are crowded with relatively still figures and seem to come out of the old world of Titian and Veronese. But when it came...