Word: randomization
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...asks in one particularly moving column, and opts for the existentialist answer that the universe is absurd, that her illness is simply random luck. In that way, she is able not only to shed self-pity but to turn the question around: "Why not me?" From there, she explains, it is "only a matter of time to it is me-and what am I going...
They are strewn across a desolate landscape along the Maine coast like pebbles on the beach. Looking like scattered desert plants, wooden shacks and suburban pre-fabs just out of the ground with random incongruity. The paths have no names, few of the houses are numbered. This is an Indian village, changed, yet unchanged from centuries ago. Children play, dogs breed wild. Noises, the restless sea, the rush of a lonely car, wind. People are building...
...Montoneros. Once a neo-Peronist youth group-the name means bushfighters-the Marxist Montoneros of Argentina were responsible for many of the random murders and kidnapings during the regime of Isabelita Perón. The military junta has mounted a countrywide war against these archetypal Latin American guerrillas, whose goal is to take over the government. At least 9,000 Montoneros have been killed or detained by police. But an estimated 12,000 remain at large, and their leaders-Mario Firmenich, Fernando Vaca Narvaja, Horacio Mendizabál-have close contacts with the Palestinians. The Montonero slogan: FATHERLAND OR DEATH...
Kosinski's novel is an assemblage of such images. His art once again enlists itself in the service of random violence (the hero of one of his earlier novels was named Chance). By inference and direct statement, Kosinski argues that people only make a bad situation worse by imagining that their lives have a purpose. Cruelty, Levanter muses, is magnified when those in authority "forget that their power is nothing more than a temporary camouflage of mortality." When a wealthy widow asks Levanter to marry her, he becomes frightened at the suggestion that the two of them can construct...
...while he works in his father's office, collecting rents; then he tries a love affair with Pilate's not-quite-crazy granddaughter. These routes are not satisfying, but neither is his friendship with Guitar, a violently angry man who retaliates against murders of blacks with murders of random whites...