Word: skinless
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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This shallow breathing occurs during a doleful evening in which Clara and three other skinless neurotics are bullied in a desultory way by a thick-skinned fifth person, Clara's frightful mother Laura. The other characters are Clara's drunken stepfather; her uncle, an exhausted, ironical pederast; and a middleaged, neuter male publisher who is a family friend. There is too much drinking, too much smoking, too much acute description of mental states. The author, unwilling to waste a scrap of anguish, views the browned-out scene through the eyes of each gloomy participant in turn. Boredom, peevishness...
...down ontop of a sack of potatoes offered me by a peasant in the corridor of the next train out of Yugoslavia. I hadn't known you could bring sheep onto a passenger train, but maybe this one didn't count--it had, after all, been reduced to a skinless carcass and it swayed neatly and gently on a hook in the doorway. After our tickets had been punched, I decided to stroll on up to the first class just in case I could weasel a genuine seat...