Word: surrealisms
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...ostentation as the beginning three lines. In the midst of this deceptively unadorned prose, however, lurks the seed of an almost unimagineably horrible tale, which Appelfeld manages to recount in completely nonjudgmental strokes. Ultimately, it's clear why Appelfeld has been called a "worthy successor to Kafka" with his surreal, yet plausible, plots. Though the legacy of the Holocaust is never explicit, The Conversion often seems a device forcing the reader to question reality, and our ability to believe (or ignore) its ramifications...
Although O'Donnell addresses serious issues and makes profound points, he does not lose sight of the fact that his quirky, off-beat style always teeters on the absurd and surreal. He is able to make fun of himself and his genre, which keeps him from becoming pretentious or sounding insincere. This is most artfully done when Tad watches his friend's ludicrous performance-art piece. His friend sits, mostly naked, in a bathtub, talking about how alone he is and how his parents "never took me to Disneyland!" and finishes the piece by cutting his wrists, which he immediately...
...Rothschilds--benefactors of progress, multilingual cosmopolitans, patrons of the arts, sponsors of Rossini and Balzac, vintners of Mouton and Lafite--was shadowed by a vicious anti-Semitic twin, the view that culminated in Hitler's speeches about "the rapacity of a Rothschild." The family became an all-purpose and surreal villain. Karl Marx vilified the Rothschilds as a quintessence of capitalist evil. One contemporary conspiracy theorist argued that the Rothschilds "arranged the murder of President Lincoln" and, later on, financed the rise of Hitler as a bulwark against the Soviet Union...
...than any gazillion-dollar epic by James Cameron ever could. And Master Georgie reminds one, again, that war correspondents do not always get it right. As Bainbridge's group slogs across the Crimean peninsula, men and animals dropping from cholera and in battle all around them, the scene becomes surreal. At one point a soldier shows up with his ear blown off. "He kept shaking our hands in turn and saying how happy he was to meet us...the blood flying in all directions as he pumped," Pompey Jones recalls. "Then he dropped dead...
...real credit in The Alarmist must go to the actors. Like Mt. Rushmore, their place in the surroundings is hard to surmise, but they define it anyway. They convince the audience of what is happening, and sell the surreal with their gregarity. David Arquette is set with a particularly difficult part in the role of Tommy, who must be both densely naive and a stunningly talented salesman. His innocent pursuit of a sophisticated older woman has a good shot at being the new classic in the older woman-younger man scenario. Kate Capshaw is similarly adept in this situation...