Word: reader
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...writer has communicated loneliness and despair more graphically than did Leduc. Her astonishing confessional quality, what Simone de Beauvoir called her "unflinching sincerity, as though there were no one listening", made her autobiographies. Le Batarde and Mad in Pursuit, at once fascinating and embarassing, forcing the reader into the stance of a literary voyeur, unable to put down the sordid but compelling story of her psychotic, unrequited passion for Genet, of her lesbianism, and her complete despair. No human being has ever been more lonely than Violette Leduc...
Nothing gets gritty in the film except the language, and then most of the grit has been taken out. Roth's book made the sex explicit and the characterizations vague, often openly begging a personal response from the reader. Lehman's movie does the reverse, making the characterizations explicit and the sex removed. The sets are overit and uninteresting. And little of the Jewish ambience is evoked visually; being Jewish to Lehman means the mother wearing a mezzuzah, being Gentile means a Catholic hooker wearing a cross...
...desperation. It was not made, she concludes, in a religious spirit, with faith that it might be effective. "I know what prayer should be," concludes Nicolette, "and my cries did not resemble prayer in any meaningful way." All in all she makes a fine singlehanded sailing companion for any reader...
...Beauvoir makes grim truce with sexual frustration, she is unwilling to accept the defeat of occupational potency and its concommitant alienation from society. In this respect, her thesis about old age as the index of society is double-edged. For five hundred and seventy pages she bombards the reader with the horrors of old age. Never does she pretend that the resolution of old age is the amelioration of the life-style of the aged. She convinces the reader that old age is the most telling of all the stages of a human being's life...
...them as lovers and kidnapers, "dark and lithe, a pair of strong gray wolves," from whom she wishes to be rescued. At journal's end, the long-suffering Michael is helping a glamorous blonde finish her thesis. Hannah takes this as the end of her love, and the reader can only wonder what took so long...