Word: thumbs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Zealand's centeral Otago; the region may exist only in the wonderfully deranged mind of novel's narrator, herself a chimera of identities. She is, at various stages, Violet Pansy Proudlock, a ventriloquist: Mavis Barwell, widow of a French teacher turned debt collector; and Alice Thumb, a novelist...
There, in the guise of Novelist Alice Thumb, the narrator accepts an invitation from an elderly couple to use their vacation in Italy. Her writer's eye quickly perceives that the dwelling's modern angularities serve no other function than a change from the traditional. Its furnishings are a collection of expensive replicas; the library is a random reflection of the chic. One volume is titled A Lifetime Reading Plan...
...that and more, for she proves to be not only spinner of bizarre and hunting fantasy but a sharp social observer as well. Her descriptions of New Zealand suburbanization, of California as public confessional booth, of television and religious fakers convey a reality as urgent as Alice Thumb's creativeschizophrenia. -R.Z. Sheppard...
...will write a book. Another book. I know that our age has been propelled, blackmailed into becoming the Age of Explanation. I feel that literate people have almost explained themselves away. I use the word 'literate' as a fact, not a judgment. At first, you remember, Alice Thumb, it was our anxiety, our unease which was explained away, but in the process, we ourselves have been disappearing. The efficiency of our explanations is like that of the insecticide which reduces the insect to a crumbling shell...
...wrote English Essayist Francis Bacon in 1625. For centuries his countrymen have been doing their best to turn their rocky little island into a facsimile of Eden. England is a nation of gardeners, and at no time has the national green thumb been more visible. The English Tourist Board has declared...