Word: una
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That tour de force was followed by Sena Naslund's Ahab's Wife, in which young Una Spencer goes to sea disguised as a boy and eventually encounters Melville's legendary whaling captain. Marriage and a child follow before Ahab goes off to chase Moby Dick and Una becomes a freethinker, abolitionist and, in time, Ishmael's significant other...
This novel has pretensions, but they are overridden by Allende's riproaring girl's adventure story. In fact, the book exemplifies the new feminist approach by plugging late 20th century cultural attitudes into a spacious 19th century literary vehicle. Like Una Spencer, Eliza Sommers makes her way in the world by cross-dressing. She befriends a Chinese healer who becomes her confidant, her partner in an alternative-medicine practice and eventually her soul mate for life. Throughout it all, Allende projects a woman's point of view with confidence, control and an expansive definition of romance as a fact...
...England in 1840, a charged, visionary realm atremble with religious longings and debate. Privets are shaped like sperm whales. Inns are kept by witches. Women ask each other in passing, "What do you think of the afterlife?" Your guide through this God-racked wilderness is a classically captivating heroine, Una Spenser, drawn equally to storms and speculations...
...following him not just into the details of harpooning and coffin-shaped beds, but also into bloodshed and delirium and diabolism. "Blast winds! and spank these sails as though they were the flanks of horses," cries her Ahab, and we shiver anew as we recall that, one paragraph earlier, Una has found in him a "soft glowing...
...been different had Bolton started studying voice 20 years ago, but belting ballads has worn his middle range to a thread. Though he squeezes out the necessary high notes, after a fashion, everything else is bad to the point of black comedy, from the flabby scooping in Donizetti's Una furtiva lagrima to the wimpy crooning in Puccini's Che gelida manina (real Italian tenors are not sensitive...