Word: reader
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Young Dr. Herriot is forever stripping to the waist in some drafty Darrowby barn and soaping up his arm to plunge it into one troubled animal orifice or another. For Herriot, and the reader, the rewards of such expeditions range from delivery of little nibbling creatures who sometimes get stuck in the process of being born, to the periodic relief administered to Tricki Woo, a pampered little Pekingese constantly overfed by her mistress. To be fair, though, as Herriot invariably is, the struggling assistant vet is every bit as susceptible to .the sherry and smoked oysters supplied him by Tricki...
...author's other novels are as impressive as this one is futile. The Painted Bird follows the frightful journey of a small boy as he stumbles through war-torn Poland searching for his parents, while Steps observes a refugee's nightmarish encounters with America. A reader trying to account for the disparity between those books and The Devil Tree is driven to the not entirely convincing conclusion that Kosinski, who is a Pole, has strayed too far from his artistic roots. -John Skow
...earth itself is wet black and you can shove a spade down into it up to the handle without hitting a rock. A tin can will grow here...The narrator's muffled but desperately articulate voice speaks as if from a dungeon of alienation: the voice pleads with the reader for understanding, and as the speaker surfaces out of the narrative sporadically to grope at us, the torture of writing such a chronicle becomes a major theme. With a style like that of a mole burrowing furiously inches below the soil, sending up a series of tiny explosions of dirt...
...finds himself when the book ends. He thinks that it has something to do with his sister Nellie, but there seems to be an emotion here that is too powerful and complex for him to convey: the isolation he laments throughout the novel finally cuts him off from the reader. There should be more than just echoes of Nellie. Perhaps sometimes the sealed resonance of the style (reading the book is like probing through a cave) could put people off, making them wary of contrived profundity, of too imposing a persistence in what the author is trying...
...Sunlight Dialogues were less of an object, with cumbersome physical structures, and more of an ongoing experience in which the reader could become involved, it would fare much better. But it isn't and it doesn't. It fails, and there's much better reading to be had. Some of it's by Gardner himself; that makes it even harder to say Dialogues isn't worth the time. Or as one of the novel's characters put it: "She realized, briefly, that she was merely a character in an endless, meaningless novel, then forgot...