Word: sioux
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Both critics have a point; Cooper's characterization of Natty Bumppo, the sharpshooter who boasts, "What I can see, I can hit at a hundred yards, though it were only a mosquitoe's eye," shuttles uneasily from stolid frontiersman to animated cartoon. Yet the surrounding Delaware, Iroquois and Sioux are presented for the first time as complex beings with heroic as well as villainous traits. It took another century to amplify the efforts of Cooper, whose unacknowledged voice can still be heard in romantic protest literature and films. If his works now seem closer to scenarios than to novels...
Collected Poems 1947-1980, Allen Ginsberg -- The Fifth Son, Elie Wiesel -- Money: A Suicide Note, Martin Amis -- The Sioux, Irene Handl -- The Tenth Man, Graham Greene...
...Sioux certainly deserves that, if only as a tribute to reckless originality. A stranger tale and an odder telling would be hard to confect. Vincent Castleton, 43, an English banker in New Orleans, has married Marguerite Benoir, also known as Mim or Mimi to the handful of people on earth she regards as equals. These include most of the Benoirs, an impossibly rich and haughty French clan whose members call themselves the Sioux, perhaps as a tribute to their own ferocity. Mim, in her mid-20s, has led a luxurious but troubled life. Her first marriage, to Cousin Georges Benoir...
...them Moumou, Puss and the Dauphin. This spectrally beautiful, thin, pale child speaks a bewildering mixture of French and "Ol' Kintuck," the hayseed dialect he absorbed during his brief exposure to Governor Davis' three strapping sons: "O, he jest being plain bad. O, il m'echappe toujours!" All the Sioux are holding their breath to see how George takes to Castleton. Armand reassures his brother-in-law: "The Dauphin has a truly terrifying sense of gratitude. You'll be annihilated by it, my poor Vince. Nothing can stand up against this terrible, slow gratitude of the Dauphin...
...hide the fact that not much of substance is happening. Handl's people are splendidly funny because they all, with the possible exception of Castleton, are permanently set in their absurd ways. Not much room is left over for suspense. A little more forward momentum might have made The Sioux a minor classic. As it now stands, or careens, the novel is a curiosity tres chic...