Word: frenched
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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Verena Conley was born and educated in Switzerland. She speaks French and German as well as English, and specializes in French cultural studies and comparative literature. She is teaching French 167: "Parisian Cityscapes" this semester in the Romance Languages and Literatures department...
...between Chick and Ravelstein cover a broad array of eternal questions, including, inevitably, death and the possibility of an afterlife. But the novel reads like the antithesis of abstractions. Ravelstein brims with life thanks to Chick's, that is, Bellow's, comic observations on the passing scene. Here are French waiters "working like acrobats" at a dinner Ravelstein throws for Chick at an exclusive Paris restaurant. Here is Chick on Ravelstein's notoriously messy eating habits: "An experienced hostess would have spread newspapers under his chair." Here is Ravelstein amused, laughing "like Picasso's wounded horse in Guernica, rearing back...
...Chick himself nearly dies after eating a bad red snapper during a Caribbean vacation with his new wife Rosamund. Bellow readily acknowledges that this part of the novel was lifted pretty directly from his own life in 1994. "I was in St. Martin, and I went to a little French restaurant. I said, 'Do you have any local catch?' thinking that I'd outsmart the frozen-fish scene. But it didn't work, because it is the inland fish, the reef feeders, who get these poisons." Thanks to Freedman's quick thinking in an emergency, Bellow was flown back...
...SARTRE DATE TWINS? Hard to imagine why the French find Americans crass. Just last week the two lands almost mirrored each other. Parisians dedicated a street corner to novelists Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, and Chicagoans dedicated a corner to a literary giant of their own: Hugh Hefner...
...Most of them were instantly killed or sent to the Gulag, victims of Stalinist paranoia. This complex, heartbreaking film recounts the brutal struggle of one couple to survive. Oleg Menchikov plays a doctor, valuable to the state, who gets along by pretending to go along. Sandrine Bonnaire is his French-born wife, on whom the state visits its worst depredations. But East-West is more than their story; it is a great, gray epic of a society wasted and terrorized, its idealism sadistically traduced...