Word: wittman
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...also manipulative. Kingston's book aims for as many allusions per page as James Joyce, but she avoids becoming a nuisance by putting the allusions in the mind of Wittman and treating them all but seriously...
LOOK at the book's opening sentence: "Maybe it comes from living in San Francisco, city of clammy humors and foghorns that warn and warn--omen, o-o-men, o dolorous men, o dolors of omens--and not enough sun, but Wittman Ah Sing considered suicide every day." This phrase could be the bad opening of a bad novel, the unwieldy preface to an overbearing descriptive work, the sort of thing the Surrealists objected to in their first manifesto. Except, in this case it is intentional...
Plot, however, is not her strong suit, given that alientation has been the key theme in every major modern work since existentialism. What Wittman does and says is not original. Even his dream--of writing an epic play that would weave together Chinese novels and tales about the famed monkey who brings back Buddhist scripts from India--is based on others' thoughts. And nothing really happens in the book; the drama is practically irrelevant...
...rebel with a cause" to the depths of his personality, and at the bottom comes up with a vision of America and the American dream and California, of integration and discrimination, of the '60s and the '80s. Although sometimes her work seems as out-of-focus as the glasses Wittman wears, it is on the whole breathtakingly fascinating...
...last Feb. 17. Suddenly another skier, Howard Hidle, 31, came hurtling down the hill. He barreled into Kari, the force of the collision throwing him 20 ft. into a stack of ski racks. Kari died the next day. A week after that incident, Terrence Coghlan, 38, crashed into Russell Wittman, 8, in Steamboat Springs, Colo., shattering the boy's right...