Word: salamanca
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...CHANGE, by J. R. Salamanca. Bitterness and tenderness are the alternating currents in this novel of the breakup of a marriage by the author of The Lost Country and Lilith...
...Marriage is a desperate thing," wrote the 17th century English jurist John Selden. Three centuries later, after 13 years of seeming marital bliss, the two main characters in J. R. Salamanca's superb new novel suddenly discover what complex anguish Selden had in mind...
...CHANGE by J. R. Salamanca. 501 pages. Knopf...
...Salamanca, 45, teaches English at the University of Maryland. He explored the theme of troubled love under widely different and far more dramatic circumstances in his first two novels, The Lost Country and Lilith. Just because the Pritchards are so ordinary, the corruption wrought by self-knowledge in A Sea Change is more ironic and profound. In an attempt to provoke a return to the freshness of their early love, the Pritchards torment each other in various subtle as well as insidious ways-until nothing is left of their marriage...
Although the marriage ends with Margaret's disappearance from Cap Ferrat, it lives on in Michael's mind, recounted and reflected upon there in a sometimes ironic, sometimes bitter, often tender and usually elegiac tone. By using the erudite Michael as his narrator, J. R. Salamanca succeeds in finding an appropriate vehicle for his insights and his fluid poetic prose. Few writers have shown so perceptively that love and marriage are not as simply connected as the horse and carriage...