Word: tales
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...impassioned banjoist, a nimbly authoritative clog dancer, a soulful singer of folk music and an enthralling tall-tale raconteur. He gyrates to the pipes of Pan. He is making his theatrical debut in Chicago's Body Politic Theater, in an evening of intimate, unmarred intensity...
Using Stingo as his narrator, Styron follows these three characters through a long hot summer. Stingo wrestles with his novel, watches a strange deterioration in his friend Nathan and becomes increasingly the confidant of Sophie. Her tale evolves slowly, hesitantly; she is riven with the guilt of a survivor. There are secrets from her days in Poland and her 20 months in Auschwitz that she cannot bear to think about, much less admit to Stingo...
...gradual unfolding of Sophie's tale is affecting and thoroughly convincing.Styron gives her a core of individuality that elevates her role beyond that of a symbolic victim. True, her suffering has been freighted with irony. Her father and husband, both killed soon after the Germans invaded Poland, were vicious anti-Semites. Sophie admits that she regarded the beleaguered inhabitants of the Warsaw ghetto as a buffer that would protect her and her children. She refused to work for the Polish resistance. Her arrest was a matter of blind accident; she was caught smuggling a ham into Warsaw to give...
...merry comedy of errors and enmities. But when Robert unexpectedly disappears, leaving behind blackmail notes full of corrosive charges and half-truths, the tone sours. His victims are forced to face ugly personal secrets that they have tried to bury. Territorial Rights turns into a modern Pardoner's Tale, in which the laughter is double-edged and each character unwittingly exposes himself...
...coronation because his wicked half brother wants the throne for himself. An Englishman who is a perfect double for the man who would be king is recruited to stand in for him, drawing the evildoer's fire until the sibling and his cohorts can be undone. In a tale of this sort, there is an irreducible minimum of suspense and action, which really cannot be satirized, lest all tension be drained from the plot. There is also a certain essential nobility of character that cannot be bleached out of the double's personality, lest all belief in these...