Word: slips
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...product of 19th century British fiction. No fooling. Charles Palliser does not resuscitate this old form -- which stretched from Jane Austen to Thomas Hardy -- in order to play modernistically with its conventions, as John Fowles did in The French Lieutenant's Woman. Never does Palliser's Victorian mask slip to reveal the ex post facto knowledge and anxieties of the present era. Pastiche is not a means to an end but the whole point of this enterprise...
...notice the slip made between history itself--the raw goods--and History, as in the relation of the past by a historian. But the past, because it is no longer in our hands, is a fluid thing; unfortunate as it is, the telling of our past by a historian, often, for all intents and purposes, becomes the past. We can only directly act on what we directly know. This is why history must be told well, told honestly, told vividly. John Clive did this. Now he is dead, and we have only his books...
...stories too. This one, about a man who turns into a huge insect, was the decade's scariest. And the most affecting, because director David Cronenberg made it a parable about how little we know of the people we love, and how much we still love them as they slip out of their control and ours...