Word: reader
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These days, any experienced romantic reader would greet each page like a fond landmark on a trip back home. Martha is a typical heroine: shy but proud, quick with the truth but slow to subtlety, attractive in certain lights but no raving beauty. Connan is a worthy offspring of Mr. Rochester, a weary, sardonic fellow who never gets around to explaining the only thing the heroine has to know. Romantic props abound: deliciously enigmatic dreams, shadows in windows, gossiping servants, a horse that throws the child. Even the nomenclature is classic: Alvean, Gillyflower, Celestine...
...reader is left with two possible explanations for this, neither of them quite satisfactory: 1) the official establishment, guardians of Telstar, etc., decided to protect the public from some sort of transcendental truth that would be bad for business; 2) the event itself was becoming so charged that it blew the nation's fuses. Unfortunately, Author Gravenson is not clear about which theory applies, although he insinuates both in a jarring epilogue in which he suddenly drops his comic mask and opts for some heavy social criticism. Reality has been edited out by the media pharisees, presumably leaving...
...reader does not enter Buechner's rarefied world but stands outside admiring. Presently he realizes that Parr, the hero, and Buechner, who invented him, are standing there beside him too. So is all that is visible of Bebb. A conversation develops among the onlookers that is solid, witty and as full of profundity as one could wish for on a hot day. Disbelief is not suspended, but since things are so pleasant, there is no reason that it should...
...artistic critique of Brecht. The most difficult is his preoccupation with results and outcomes, to the exclusion of beginnings and motives, a preoccupation which separates him from the realists. This tendency is present in most of his early plays, especially Baal and In the Jungle of Cities, where the reader finds himself faced with characters and situations acting in a seemingly irrational, or at least inexplicable, manner. Brecht creates these situations to explore the possibilities they contain, not the motivations which led up to them. In the prologue to In the Jungle of Cities, he tells...
...return to San Francisco, someone has taken the hero's place in the library, but he does not mind and the book is over. It was very nice of Brautigan to write it and of Simon & Schuster to print it, and at the end, for some reason, the reader feels nice...