Word: reader
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...insignificance must not together hint of some bad joke. Could wild chance have united the three on a freighter bound for Haiti and in the improbable events that follow? The answer is no, and it comes from Greene. His contriving hand is visible throughout, alerting and perhaps warning the reader that there is nothing in it to support, or even to deserve, belief...
...earth is indeed round like a ball. The King, however, turns down Columbus on the grounds that 1) the earth is flat, and 2) Columbus is a Jew. Actually, Columbus was not Jewish, but for some odd reason Fast does not bother to enlighten the King or the reader...
This is the fable, and it is told in a peculiarly simplistic fashion-costume-drama style minus costume-designed to give somnambulistic inevitability to the dreadful action. The hypnotic effect may not take in some readers who will be irritated by the tones of an adult careful not to use big words to a low-IQ child. Moreover, Fast's publishers call Torquemada a tour de force; it could also be a sleight of hand. How it is read probably depends on how much the reader knows of history, not excluding the history of Howard Fast...
Disc-jockeys were asked to predict the outcome of the reader poll. They had to name the top artists and guess the order of their popularity. Salerno's choices most nearly conformed to the results of the reader poll...
Caught up in the balance between that relationship and the story of the murder, at the same time conscious of the ambivalence inspired by Capote's structural framework and tonal detachment, the reader finds himself stripped of objectivity. He is forced to participate intensely, not vicariously, in the public phenomenon of impersonal terror; and allowed to share in the private world of personal fantasy--where a childhood symbol such as Perry Smith's avenging parrot "flying overhead, red and green/green and tangerine" becomes a vision that enobles a headline terrorist...