Word: reader
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...typical autobiographical Babel childhood story, the reader slips into the author's atmosphere of old Odessa as if it were a familiar coat. Within a framework of shop-lined streets, savory meals and sturdy furnishings, the young narrator casually spins the tale of his grandmother, an embittered illiterate who urges her grandson to study hard and learn everything. To her, knowledge is not an instrument of discovery but a weapon of revenge that will bring the world to its knees...
...hands of a writer with a gram of sentimentality the situation would be ludicrous. But as with all Lessing novels, the immersed reader is too involved to laugh. The reaction is more akin to horror. People are suffering because they are caught in the breakdown of society. Private institutions like marriage and the family lead to isolation or madness; public causes and institutions reflect that madness in alternating currents of paranoia and greed. Old activists like Mark Coldridge have quit fighting. His only political activity is to keep two huge world maps, one charting wars and riots, the other showing...
...kept them from the other two." Yet each kept "guessing and misunderstanding the motives and actions of the others." To know this trio requires reproducing hundreds of letters, in which the Cranes destroyed each other in the language of greeting cards. The correspondence is a trial to biographer and reader, especially in view of the sickening domestic sentimentality that surrounded all the Cranes...
...James Baldwin can match the fervid personal essays in his The Fire Next Time. What black fiction can begin to compare with The Autobiography of Malcolm X or even Claude Brown's somewhat overrated Manchild in the Promised Land? The fire a black autobiographer kindles burns the reader. The fire a black novelist sets has a way of burning himself -blowing his cool, singeing his prose style and casting clouds of smoke over his intentions...
...conscious and unconvincing one-of a mercantile society's well-known and often belabored shortcomings. Tournier intended some satirical comment on civilization's defects, of course, or why else so pointedly rewrite a tract in which the Western world is praised? What gradually dawns on the surprised reader is that the author has accomplished much more. As a 20th century author, Tournier is concerned with Defoe's implicit but largely unexplored theme, the development of a mind in isolation. With a winning blend of Parisian wit and sensuousness, he concentrates not on Crusoe's conclusions...