Word: metaphorical
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Aciman’s shower of allusions is too perfunctory to do justice to the ideas and places he is evoking. The nod to a different cultural context is shallow, but additionally becomes disturbing when Aciman uses metaphors reminiscent of the pain and trauma caused by World War II to describe the main character’s somewhat unconvincing anguish at Clara’s rejection. He morosely declares, “I’ll always hate you for this, for bringing me to the abyss and forcing me to stare down, the way they force a detainee...
...vales and hills of South Korea, a "nation of unending waves!" For 10 years he lived off alms, often sleeping in graveyards and caves. He also published his first poems, which he has since likened to "tufts of grass among the ruins" of the fratricidal war - a typically earthy metaphor for a poet derided by his detractors as artless and quaintly rustic. The landscapes in his poems are undeniably folksy. Villagers get drunk on bootleg makgeolli - the milky, fizzy rice wine making a comeback in South Korea these days, thanks in part to a national grain surplus. Surprised burglars...
...structural level is just where his language begins to break down. The thrill of the Nabokovian sentence lies in its intense compression, that hyper-compacted poetry of the apposite adjective or unexpected metaphor that separates it from the more loosely polemical Russian literary tradition. It’s why Nabokov adored Tolstoy’s taut prose and thought Dostoevsky a hack. In “Laura” this compression unravels—degenerating near the end into mere personal notes (“invent tradename, e.g. cephalopium”) and haphazard lists (drawing linkages between self-dissolution...
Woodrow Wilson once said that football "develops more moral qualities than any other game of athletics." The game has always been a laboratory for traits like teamwork, discipline and perseverance. If it is to remain a metaphor for American exceptionalism, however, we can't let it leave so many victims in its wake. Here's a game plan to lessen the pain...
...Committed, in the way that your narcissistic pal is more riveting than your earnest, loyal girlfriend. Powell's interest in butchery is genuine, and the passages set during her internship at Fleisher's, an upstate New York butcher shop, bristle with clarity. That's not to say the intended metaphor - that as she learns to butcher, she's also exploring the anatomy of her tumultuous love life - is clear or convincing, largely because her journey feels so incomplete...