Word: protagonists
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...problem connecting. Corde recalls from the Bucharest flat in endless flashbacks and conversations the list of horrors, but we can't manage to see them quite so vividly as Corde does. Only once does Bellow, who seems to stand fairly close behind Corde, trying to speak over his protagonist's shoulder, break through. Describing a case in which a man kidnaps a woman, rapes her repeatedly and locks her in the trunk of his car, finally shooting her and dumping the body in a trash heap. Bellow drives home the point of a world out of control. But he undercuts...
EVERY BELLOW NOVEL has at its center some slightly modified version of the Bellow hero. A dreamy type, someone off in his own world--irretrievable so to the "commonsensical" folk surrounding him. The Bellow protagonist is a seer, a dealer in the currency of big ideas and grand historical visions. And yet, he has street smarts--savvy gleaned from a long well-spent education. But whether a garden-variety schlemiel like Tommy Wilhelm of Seize the Day, a disheveled and dislocated intellectual like Mosses Herzog of Herzog, or a questionably successful writer like Charlie Citrine of Humboldt's Gift. Homo...
...small apartment in Bucharest, waiting for his mother-in-law to die. Meditatively, he licks the wounds of recent Chicago battles--battles which rage unabated, awaiting his return. While ineptly ministering to the miseries of his emigre/astronomer ("Palomar calibre") wife. Minna (perhaps Bellow is losing his old feisttness: this protagonist is happily married, with no Renatas or Ramonas to scheme over him, no vicious wives trying to castrate him), and sucking down plum brandy. Corde explores the smoldering wreckage of life in Chicago, his and the city...
...girlfriend (the darkly sensual Laura Morante), a radical worker-priest (Victor Cavallo), maybe even Primo's patrician wife (Anouk Aimee) - is involved in the abduction. Conspiracy or paranoia? Primo says: "I prefer not to know." And the film takes no sides, instead allowing both protagonist and moviegoer to entertain each terrible possibility...
Lore Segal is responsible for fluent translations of such fairy tales. Her original composition shows how closely she has studied the source. In her folkloric The Story of Old Mrs. Brubeck (Pantheon; $8.95), the protagonist is the kind of grandmother who makes worry a vocation. She finds trouble everywhere in and under the bed, around the house, in the yard, until she makes a life-altering discovery. The reason why trouble is so clinging and so dark is that it is a shadow closely resembling the klutzy figure of one Mrs. Brubeck. Marcia Sewall's illustrations provide precisely...