Word: straus
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...POINT A CHARACTER IN Death in the Andes (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 276 pages; $24) finds himself in a government office in Lima "facing a photograph of the President of the Republic, who seemed to look at him sardonically from the wall." It is an odd moment for the reader because, had recent history turned out differently, that photograph might have been of Mario Vargas Llosa, who ran unsuccessfully for the presidency of Peru in 1990. Of course, had Vargas Llosa won that election, he almost certainly would not have had the time to write Death in the Andes...
PUZZLING OVER WHY Jamaica Kincaid gave the title she did to the novel she wrote, The Autobiography of My Mother (Farrar Straus Giroux; 228 pages; $20), is one of the season's better literary games. The book's striking central figure, apparently a fictional portrait of Kincaid's mother, aborts her only pregnancy at age 15 and is in fact childless--making a logical contradiction of the title. The reward here, as always with Kincaid's work, is the reading of her clear, bitter prose...
Registration will take place from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Upperclass students will register in their houses, while first-years will register in Straus Common Room. "It's going to be a little small," Smith said of Straus, "but it's only 1600 people over a period of time. I think it could suffice...
...GALATEA 2.2 by Richard Powers (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). The Galatea in this reworking of the myth is not a statue but an enormously complicated network of computer circuitry that, on a bet, is being taught to think. The Pygmalions--there are a couple of them--are an acerbic cyber-scientist and a lovelorn novelist named (hmm?) Richard Powers. A scheme that might seem mechanical and too clever works out instead to be humane and thoughtful and, when the computer is troubled by 3 a.m. brooding ("What race am I? What races hate me?"), surprisingly moving...
READ AS A WORK OF PURE IMAGInation, the powerfully written Holocaust chronicle that Hungarian author Janos Nyiri calls a novel (Battlefields and Playgrounds; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 536 pages; $25) has some inconsistencies. Most of these involve a too broad awareness of the military and political progression of the war, which might be appropriate to an adult survivor looking back at chaos, but not to the day-to-day fears of the young Jewish boy Jozska, eight years old at the war's outset, from whose point of view the story is told...