Word: theming
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Jerusalem, a girl who has survived the internment camps of Sarajevo, appears mysteriously at the door of a convent. Quickly taken in by the nuns and the scholars in residence, this girl, Andrea, charms everyone. Her obsession with the show Wheel of Fortune becomes a central theme of the novel. Codrescu's interest focuses on Vanna White, a subject of mass worship who brings meaning to the world by connecting letters into words. References to the game-show throughout the novel bring with them the hope that somehow all the loose ends will eventually be tied...
Besides being dull, the plot entirely fails to come together at the end. The Wheel of Fortune theme that seems to show such promise never comes through and seems ultimately unrelated to the novel's meaning. The idea of a man bent on causing apocalypse to wipe out the consumer society is little more than a regurgitation of long overused cliches. And neither is the message of Messiah any major surprise. The messiah saves the world through-what else?-love! Here is a safe and time tested-vision but one incapable of laying claim to any originality...
...poorly intermingled with underdeveloped sub-stories. Carla's sisters are presented as dysfunctional daughters, at least in the eyes of their mother who describes Caroline as a "dedicated underachiever" and Heather as a "Gay workaholic." Both characters have the potential to make substantial contributions to the main theme but do not. Each is simply thrown into the mixing bowl by director Gary Marshall, adding a hint of flavor but Zero texture...
...worst (which, given Malcolm's excitement and insight as a journalist, isn't very bad), the book founders on Malcolm's signature theme: the biases of the journalist as a narrator who chooses sides in the fight over which stories are true. While her last book, The Silent Woman, used the controversy over the death and estate of the suicide poet Sylvia Plath to illuminate brilliantly these questions of authority, here the justice system becomes her battleground; lawyers dispute not over matters of law but something more beautiful and strange, the power of stories to overwhelm the truth...
...Easy in the islands" is the theme at the Calypso Sunday Brunch at the Rhythm & Spice Caribbean Grill. Experience the melting-pot food and music of Jamaica, Barbados and other former English colonies. 315 Massachusetts...