Word: evening
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Dates: during 1990-1990
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JEEVES TAKES CHARGE. Edward Duke impersonates P.G. Wodehouse's magisterial butler, his dimwit employer Bertie Wooster and even a terrifying aunt or two in this one-man triumph in Cambridge, Mass...
...lies, no less corrupting for being universally recognized as lies. He spurned every chance to redeem his fortunes by recantation or silence. When the system made him suffer, his suffering became the subject of his art. Forced for a time to work stacking empty beer barrels, he turned even that into two brief satires. Although the obvious villains in his writings were communist leaders, whom he sometimes denounced by name, his ultimate targets were fellow citizens, whose crime lay in getting along by going along. His moral courage was accompanied, as is often the case with self-selected martyrs...
...actually were an enemy of the society in which he grew up, it would be understandable. Long before he was singled out for his outspoken politics and insurrectionist art, he was subjected to discrimination because he was born to wealth. His father was a real estate developer. An even richer uncle owned hotels and the Barrandov movie studios, which remain the center of Czechoslovak filmmaking. One of his English-language translators, Czech emigre Vera Blackwell, has said, "If Czechoslovakia had remained primarily a capitalist society, Vaclav Havel would be just about the richest man in the country." Instead...
...Even at low ebb, Havel was protected in some measure by his prominence abroad. Authorities made no effort to uproot him from the handsome granite apartment block built by his father and also tenanted by his brother, where Havel has room after room lined with books and videotapes, the elegance tempered by big beer-hall ashtrays, overflowing with butts, on seemingly every table. The car that the police most often vandalized was a white Mercedes. Although his manner is earthy and direct and his short, dumpy frame and mustache bring to mind a small, playful walrus, Havel still...
...author's smartest move is letting Hilary tell the tale. This young woman seems peculiarly passive and affectless, not the sort to dwell on or even recognize pathos or tragedy. All perceptions -- grocery displays, radio chatter, the sight of Victor vomiting in a bathroom -- pass through her consciousness with equal weightlessness. Hilary constantly learns things that anyone her age should probably already know. She removes some pictures from the room she and Victor have rented: "When I took them from the wall I noticed that the spaces the frames had occupied were a darker shade than the rest...