Word: reader
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...Habit of His. For the Western reader, Snow Country provides a key to the lesser-known regions of Japanese life. Particularly evocative are Kawabata's descriptions of the look of Japan. "The solid, integral shape of the mountain, taking up the whole of the evening landscape there at the end of the plain, was set off in a deep purple against the pale light of the sky." His eye for physical description is sharp. "Her skin, suggesting the newness of a freshly peeled onion or perhaps a lily bulb, was flushed faintly, even to the throat...
...book is filled with comic scenes, acute insights and memorable characters -among them a salesman named Mr. Blue, who will perform 50 push-ups at the drop of a hint. The narrative ramblings, like a drunk's broken-field running, occasionally lose the reader in a muddiness of form. But they are part of the mad scramble that eventually makes Exley the winner his protagonist was so desperate...
...more, and then collapse together, so that when one reads them, they explode in the mind, like the little pills that become animals when one drops them in water. Berryman makes his words work double and triple time, using puns and irony as no one else can. Often the reader is at a total loss--Berryman tries to say so much that his shorthand is sometimes legible only to himself, if at all. It reminds one of Finnegans Wake. What can one make, for instance, of "an egg lined with...
...nothing, but that Henry is Henry and is still alive. The pattern, if there is one, may not be evident even to Berryman, and certainly not to Henry. Berryman says "its ultimate structure ... [is] according to his [Henry's] nature" (293), but that is not much help to the reader...
...talking of the poet as he sees himself; the reader sees something different. Picture a seagull unhappy, hungry for a clam. He flies in perfect beauty, a perfect grace visible to all eyes but his own. John Berryman, however difficult his own muddle may be, exhibits to us a true grace of craftsmanship and earnestness...