Word: surrealness
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Tales of the oddities, cruelties and bizarre twists that occurred began to pour forth after the return to the U.S. of the last 39 hostages. Some stories were horrific, some implausible, others surreal. There were accounts of the hijackers turning away from stark brutality to administer kindnesses to passengers: fetching a blanket for a young girl with bronchitis, providing cough drops for a passenger with cold symptoms. One terrorist, it was recalled, proposed marriage to the flight's purser; at another point, a hijacker beat a passenger, threatened to shoot him, then apologized and wept with his victim. Passengers became...
Throughout the week, events had seemed to grow increasingly surreal as the hostages, whose freedom seemed so tantalizingly out of reach, were continually shown on television eating, talking and even driving themselves around Beirut with their captors. For days, Amal guards brought small groups of hostages before television camera crews for interviews that were replayed incessantly in the U.S. Though some of the hostages confessed to depression and anxiety, others, presumably to reassure their watching families, mugged and shouted "Hi, Mom!" as if they had been filmed at a picnic. White House officials protested that television was playing into...
...like a nightmarish rerun of the Iranian hostage drama, with a surreal twist. Once again American hostages were paraded before the cameras by their terrorist captors. Only this time they were not blindfolded, as the American embassy officials had been in Tehran, or made to grovel by bug-eyed radicals shouting "Death to America!" Rather, the prisoners, some unshaven, all uneasy, but combed and neat, were graciously ushered out to meet the press...
...reprints of Lewis' iconoclastic works, like the magazine Blast (1914 and 1915) and the autobiographical Rude Assignment, were illustrated with Lewis' adrenal scrawls and became another profitable venture. Deliberately bold typefaces that varied wildly in size to emphasize certain words, according to the author's wishes, as well as surreal pronouncements ("A picture of a man either is or is not") exerted an appeal on college audiences: more than 50,000 copies of Lewisiana have been sold, and other volumes are on the way. "Lewis wrote 45 books," proclaims Martin. "And Black Sparrow has reprint rights to all of them...
Allende is not just an epigone of Garcia Marquez. Writing in the tradition of Latin America's magic realists, she has a singular talent for producing full- scale representational portraits with comic surreal touches. Her rendering of the Trueba patriarch Esteban and his wife Clara is a hilarious display of mismatching. While the crude, commonsensical Esteban is doomed by nature to cause constant offense to his wife, Clara the Clairvoyant irritates her spouse by her perpetual whispered concourse with the spirits...