Word: yoknapatawphaed
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Similar images emerge in Nattel's dreamscapes. Like most descendants of East European Jewry, Nattel has a knowledge of her ancestry only a few generations deep. Blaszka, then, is a fictional place where the Canadian author attempts to link emotionally and spiritually with her unknown forebears. Like Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County and Garcia Marquez's Macondo, Nattel's imagined backwater is shot through with mythic significance. Even the river of the novel's title surges with the metaphorical force of Mother Ganges...
...together not by the Force, but rather by the utter ineptitude and poor marksmanship of the Storm Troopers. However, the plot of "Star Wars" is in fact what separates it from its imitators. Lucas creates an entire universe akin to Tolkien's Middle-Earth or even William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County. But unlike these two creators, Lucas builds his universe with broad strokes, providing a comprehensive visual and narrative world even though we do not know such specifics as the nature of the Rebels' true cause, the story behind the Clone Wars, or the scope of the Empire. He also...
...Greenland, is not something novelist (and former TIME contributor) Brad Leithauser bothers to explain. If you don't like Freeland, the gray and chilly outpost of which he is the sole curator of history, customs and current events, then chase your moonbeams in Lake Wobegon or your copperheads in Yoknapatawpha County...
Gabriel Garcia Marquez is known as South America's William Faulkner with good reason. Both added new territory to the map of fiction. Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha is an imaginary county that contains nearly all one needs to know about the old South, the Lost Cause and the rise of the scalawag class. Garcia's Macondo is a conjured region of Colombia's Caribbean coast that holds the essence of Latin America's ruinous history. The power of these microcosmic worlds brought Nobel Prizes to both men and ensured their subsequent work the utmost attention...
This is not realistic fiction; it's Glocca Morra with a boarded-up main street. Or maybe Yoknapatawpha lite. At its thinnest it seems more jokey than funny. Occasionally, it threatens to become patronizing. Most of the time it works, however, not so much because the author keeps things stirred up but because he persuades the reader to share his great, openhearted fondness for his ridiculous characters. A compact is signed, Russo saying something like, "O.K., yeah, Sully's being a bit of a jerk, but watch what he's going to do now . . ." Or, "Did you meet Vera...