Word: reader
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Gratuitous quotations and shy confessions follow each other in a happy jumble. The reader is treated to Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy (twice) and to an account of Wolfs first sex experience. Wolf donates a pint of blood to a hospital and allows himself to entertain giddy thoughts. He interviews some cancer patients, who have little to say, and an actor, Christopher Lee, who has played Dracula in several films. He talks with some high school girls, and although the subject of vampires does not come up, he learns a lot about teen...
...describes, it matches his every antic with page after page of verbal histrionics. One imagines writing with a harmonica in his mouth and a ball horn plugged into his typewriter. The novel bounces, gyrates and bucks like another coaster car along the precarious edge of the reader's tolerance, never quite falling off. For whenever the author leans too far in the direction of obscenity-which is frequently--he bounces right back with a metaphor or reference to feed any appetite Jackie Kennedy and James Joyce. Cyrano de Bergerac and the Berrigan Brothers. While Mays and Richard Wagner all raise...
VIRGINIA WOOLF'S contemporary high reputation as a paradigm of feminine sensibility is often puzzling. She does not emerge from Bell's chronicle as a generous, forgiving, or warm human being, though endlessly fascinating. It is her sister Vanessa who appeals to the reader for the attractive qualities Virginia lacked. Virginia's history dramatized the miseries of a sick person, for, she was, on occasion, as mad as the March Hare. She fought a painful battle against the possibility that the next attack of insanity would paralyze her permanently. Clearly, Virginia Woolf in Bell's biography is quite often piteous...
Within a few years, Franklin, of course, consciously set out to defy that admonition. One of the remote results was this leviathan of a volume. Roosevelt literature is reaching Talmudic proportions, and the prospective reader is entitled to be skeptical. But Kenneth S. Davis is a skillful journalist, novelist, historian and biographer (Eisenhower, Stevenson, Lindbergh). What is more important, he has something...
...many asides, bit-part players, odd corners of narrative, even a haunting interior monologue by Clumly's blind wife. Gardner explores everything with love and forbearance, like an old-fashioned novelist who has forgotten he must compete with television, sex books and the Good Life for the raddled reader's attention. No matter. Raddled or not, readers should ignore the flaws. Swallow the magic apples. Brush up on terza rima (to identify those snippets of The Inferno that Gardner can't keep from including). Borrow a French dictionary (to translate Gardner's morsels of French...