Word: woes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Claudia's great intellectual preoccupation -- as well as the thesis of her historical volumes -- is the random nature of history. Woe to the person who sees any order in the past; kaleidoscope is Claudia's favorite word. Effective enough at first, this aspect of Moon Tiger is overdrawn and finally tedious. A similar strain shows in what are by now familiar literary musings about the ancient stones and mysterious fossils around Lyme Regis. It is possible that Dorset should be cordoned off to novelists for a decade...
...peculiarly powerful form of gravitas may arise out of suffering. It draws its authority not only from the redemptive example of Christ but also from Greek tragedy: the terrible moral power of woe. Mother Teresa has that gravitas of the redemptive. Whole cultures may be judged weighty or weightless by the calibration of suffering. Russian history sometimes seems an entire universe of gravitas: always there is the heavy Slavic woe, the encroaching dark and metaphysical winter...
...happened is a typical tale of oil-patch woe. When petroleum prices were high in the late 1970s, First City lent extensively to oil-rig builders and small supply firms. When prices later plunged, loan defaults skyrocketed. First City then boosted its presence in real estate loans -- and that market softened. As foreclosures mounted, First City's management offered Arabian horses, Porsches or 40-ft. yachts to new customers who maintained accounts of $100,000 and up. The gimmicks did not lure enough high rollers to stanch First City's losses, and talk of a takeover, bailout or shutdown mounted...
...tradition of spurned loves, a visitor to the Quincy Qube bemoaned his fate. "Oh my dearest Betsy--if only you weren't seeing that dreadful Law School student, we could have the greatest life together. Oh woe is me, my lovely...
...this is only the start. After an idyllic interlude, the trio are rescued by a British merchant vessel and taken back to England. Before he can touch soil, Susan's last great love, Crusoe, dies of woe, sighing for his island. In London, Susan finds her way to a tale spinner significantly surnamed Foe -- Defoe's real name -- and persuades him to tell her story. But Foe keeps emphasizing the wrong themes. Susan rebels and then suffers remorse. "I am growing to understand why you wanted Crusoe to have a musket and be besieged by cannibals," she writes...