Word: reader
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...might be thought that having created this sometimes fascinating and occasionally excruciating little chronicle about a lonely boy growing up in England just after World War I, Anthony West should not be plagued by any novel reader's knowledge that the author is the natural son of Rebecca West and H. G. Wells. Yet the book, which seems to be a fictional memoir, is profoundly preoccupied with its hero's growing awareness that the woman posing as his aunt is really his mother, and that he himself knows nothing about his father. Born in 1914, West...
Surely no two phenomena could be more incompatible-in the abstract. The abstract being that two-dimensional landscape of rhetoric and copulative verbs that permits such phantasmagoria as the preceding paragraph. Bitter tears, dear reader, on my copy of What Is Cinema? Open City, Voyage to Italy, General Della Rovere, and now The Rise of Louis XIV: there is something in the anonymity of Rossellim's aesthetic, beyond abstraction or mere being, which resists the a priori...
Alongside Chomsky's apocalyptic posture-historian as moralist and trac-tarian-Bloodworth has the slouch of a cynic. He is the professional journalist, selecting the amusing or exotic tidbit for the reader's jaded palate. He has seen too much to be shocked by anything or to believe in anything. He survives by his reflex for flippancy. Yet, by a curious paradox, Bloodworth's book eventually seems wiser and even more serious than Chomsky...
...giving verbatim quotations from the Dryden translation (17th century A.D.) of Plutarch's Life of Lycurgus (2nd century A.D.). It is true that he is a certified Seer of Apollo, and the future drifts before his eyes as effortlessly as the past or the present. So the reader need not be really surprised to find Lycurgus (spelled Ly-kourgos, in the barbarous tradition of contemporary university classics departments), a dim semi-mythological figure, flinging out his arms in V-for-victory signs like General de Gaulle, or to hear members of the Lacedaemonian jet set chatter psychoanalysis, market analysis...
...your case, there is an added difficulty. Mary appears to have been written 45 years ago in Russian. Furthermore, your introduction contains many things that the average English-speaking reader may have trouble with. You say, for example, that the novel was originally titled Mashenka, with the accent on the first a (pronounced as in ask) and a palatalized n as in mignon. Even among my colleagues, all of whom pronounce mignon correctly, your instructions caused a considerable phonetic tangle, not to mention knots of rather nasty plosives and fricatives...