Word: reader
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...that he spent most of the day grinning. He would not have noticed it except that it made his face hurt." As the story unfolds in a gracefully comic style comparable to that of Joyce Cary's in The Horse's Mouth, the author, too, flashes the reader a winning smile...
Until the 20th century came along, few communities of a few thousand men could have lived so foul a life as did the first white men in Sydney. By Keneally's fictional talent, all is made vivid as fresh blood; the reader is spared the statistical compilations of realist fiction. Yet, we learn in the course of this cruel narrative that a sentence of death by torture (500 lashes of the cat-o'-ninetails amounted to just that) could be handed out by a kangaroo court of Marine officers as casually as a parking fine would be imposed...
...Sorbonne for 13 years, refusing to acquire an advanced degree. Plagued by chronic insomnia, he developed his profound sense of despair during one long nuit blanche (sleepless night) after another. Unmarried, he earns most of his modest income from part-time work as a translator and manuscript reader. "I don't make a living," he told TIME Correspondent Paul Ress last week. "I eke one out. But I don't wish to be well off." Cioran has not returned to Rumania in more than 30 years, and is a citizen of no country...
...face. She is supposed to have shot a Union soldier who invaded her parents' house in Martinsburg, W. Va. She claimed to have supplied Stonewall Jackson with information that led to a victory at Front Royal. She was a nurse, a courier, a smuggler of currency and, the reader suspects, a pest to both sides. Her several imprisonments were presumably more the result of impudence than real danger to the Union. After the war, she toured the lecture circuit as "the Rebel spy," giving dramatic readings of her "perilous" experiences. In 1900, still lecturing, Belle Boyd died...
...exception of the cynical betrayer, Rawcliffe, whose death is the most effective episide in the book, are as static and object-like as his women. The characters are exhibits of no more than equal rank with the strange locales and cunning twists of fate Burgess marshals for the reader's diversion...