Word: tracings
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...legislation will give the government broad authority to do battle with Sicily's deeply entrenched Mafia. The new high commissioner is empowered to tap telephones of suspected gangsters and to look into bank records to trace transfers of capital. Another new statute allows interrogation of witnesses behind closed doors, a provision calculated to break Sicily's code of omertà, a vow of silence by those who have witnessed crimes...
Jimmy Carter's second term disappears without a trace, and the Shah of Iran is no longer mentioned as a steadfast ally of the U.S. Egypt has a sharply different role: now it is assumed not to be a reliable Soviet client state but, in alliance with Saudi Arabia, a force that extinguishes Libyan extremism, helps to impose moderation on the Israelis and thus stabilizes the Middle East. Otherwise, our next spasm of global bloodshed remains much as imagined four years ago in The Third World War: August 1985 by retired British General Sir John Hackett...
Literalists who try to track down such matters will find that Fowles, presumably the only one with the answers, has disappeared, leaving the slim trace of a smile between the lines. Mantissa is a jeu d 'esprit with a vengeance, its principal characters, like so many of Fowles' earlier creations, held in thrall by forces they cannot quite explain. Erato and Miles are prisoners of gender. When they squabble, as they do throughout the rest of the novel, they helplessly re-enact timeless wars between the sexes...
...short-lived triumphs, Miles pedantically explains his art to Erato: "Serious modern fiction has only one subject: the difficulty of writing serious modern fiction." The joke is on everyone except Fowles. Mantissa is clearly an example of serious modern fiction, with itself as its subject, and not a trace of difficulty is visible anywhere in its construction. A susceptible soul might be led to believe that the Muses are amusing. Perhaps Erato lives...
Chanslor apparently abandoned the No-Pest idea but asked to meet with Minnery in Toronto last April to talk about another poison, ricin, which is derived from the castor bean and is difficult to trace even when a doctor knows to look for it. By this time, says Minnery, he had concluded that the discussions were perhaps not entirely academic, and he alerted Ontario police, who in turn contacted Houston authorities. A tape recording was made of the Toronto meeting at which Chanslor paid $500 to have a capsule of ricin brought to him in Houston. During the Houston meeting...