Word: reader
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...Nabokov novel is intended not as a message?but as a delight. It is also a game in which the alert reader is rewarded by feelings of wonder at the illusiveness of reality. "In a first-rate work of fiction," he argues, "the real clash is not between the characters, but between the author and the world." Nabokov's books are conceived like the chess problems that he has composed during the past half-century. He describes in an early novel the miraculous way in which a flat, abstract contrivance (in chess or art) can take on vitality and light...
Over the past decade, Maclnnes has celebrated his city and its way-in outsiders in two fair novels and a third that is superb. The three have now been reissued after long neglect, enabling the reader to roam the nightside of London with Maclnnes. Such trips involve whispers, a confusion of lights, pound notes exchanging hands, presences, but most typically a shabby street that could never be found again and a plunge down a dim staircase. At the bottom, a door. Closed, heavy, guarding the Platonic idea of door. Inside, music, smoke, cadenced talk as pungent as the smoke...
...touch is superb: Mannix has a deaf son, she relates, and thus has learned to lipread. To know what is being whispered at a testimonial dinner is to be an ironist, and Mannix is one. As he leaves the dinner to exchange ruefulnesses with an ancient Virginia jurist, the reader looks forward to a wry tour, perhaps in the Edwin O'Connor manner, of the world of liberal politics and conservative finance in which the old Jewish and old WASP families of New York meet...
...example, the article this year that, until the occupation, stirred the most controversy among readers was a short sermon by John Kenneth Galbraith on the need for restructuring at Harvard. ("The experience of Columbia is there for all to read.") More scandalous was a December 2 cover reproducing the Truc poster of a bare-assed lady milking a unicorn. (One reader suggested an apt place for the Harvard-Yale game scores.) Other articles have been about the international student movement and Dr. Timothy Leary. One issue included an almost complete reprint of the Wilson Report...
Malamud, as usual, is clear about his conclusion-and as usual uneasy with it. The reader turns each page of this little fable with a premonitory wince. Malamud has put Fidelman not so much through a pilgrimage as a forced migration. One senses that he may be all too aware that resurrections are always problematical. There is an uneasy shrillness, after all, to the notion of using a homosexual to demonstrate the complete way to fall in love with life...