Word: protagonists
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Then came Freshman Week. It rained every day. I thought of King Lear, the way the rain is supposed to parallel the inner turmoil of the characters, and I fancied myself the protagonist in my own tragedy...
Wyatt has a writer's sensibility, but Humphreys was wise to make him a lawyer. The profession symbolizes convention, respectability and decorum. Were her protagonist a writer, expectedly musing at the beach, no one would bother with him. There would be no lovely Louise, former girlfriend and wife of his ex-partner, trying to mother him back to responsibility and solvency. There would be no Billie, the child-woman who, like the dog trainer in Anne Tyler's The Accidental Tourist, teaches new tricks...
Some detractors describe Gates as a "chameleon" who, like Magnus Pym, the sociopathic protagonist of John le Carre's The Perfect Spy, finds it easy to match his coloration to whomever he needs to please. And while his friends disagree, they add wryly that it's better to have Gates as an employee than as a boss...
...certainly raised a threshold of taste, or psychic pain, much higher than most readers would like (much as the smash movie The Silence of the Lambs exposes even toddlers to a level of psychological violence that would have been unthinkable -- or at least less powerful -- some years ago). A protagonist who eats, tortures and dismembers victims is clearly assaulting all that we hold sacred. And it is painfully easy to see the damage such a book can do to the way in which men see, and therefore treat, women...
Furst's perfect-pitch re-creation begins with a fatally flawed protagonist: Andre Szara, 40, Pravda reporter in Europe and occasional Soviet spy, whose life goals have been reduced to a desire to outlast Stalin's purges. As the novel opens in 1937, Szara, a Russified Polish Jew, is caught in the midst of a blood feud in the Soviet secret services between his NKVD friends, mostly Jewish intellectuals, and Stalin's Georgian thugs. The fear that dominates Szara's nomadic life is palpable: a typically chilling passage is about his return to Russia aboard a Soviet freighter with...