Word: reader
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...general contours of Mr. Epps" thought. In abstract form, unfortunately, his thought looks much like anyone else's thought. He has reached for the sublime and come up with the ordinary. And, saddest of all, the essay often approaches the cryptic, and inevitably becomes a puzzle to the reader. Instead of moving him, it leaves him either confused or complacently proud that he has figured...
...poetically evocative, but it is interrupted by personal references that seem self-indulgent. Her sister is flying to Peking, the author mentions several times without explanation. There is a playwright named Jonah, a son, a marriage, all mentioned with verbal nudges and eyebrow lifting, none comprehensible to the reader or relevant to Killorglin. There are friends in Ireland whose portraits are washed in far too thinly for a book that at times appears to be a memoir in the act of becoming a novel. The last impression the book leaves is of a richly emotional letter from someone the reader...
...then, unfortunately, there's Alan Bates. Zorba the Greek is a superb film anyway. But anyone who has read the book would join me in adding the "anyway." For in the novel, the Englishman whom Bates portrays is a complex character, whom the reader respects as much as he loves Zorba. Zorba may embody life, but Zorba's boss hardly embodies lifelessness...
Chains of the Past. Somehow the reader reads on, for at least Author Wouk moves this minor work along in pleasant, soft-shoe style, very welcome .after the heaviness of Youngblood Hawke. And beneath the sagging routines can sometimes be seen a man with a message who got lost. Wouk is no longer at heart a comic writer. He is a moralizer. The burden of his moral is that a man is what he has been: he can do little, perhaps nothing, to break the chains of the past...
Lost Position. The game ends; Federov's reflections dissipate, having amounted to no computable sum of meaning or meaninglessness. The reader, if he finishes the novel, finishes it without the faintest notion of why the author began it. To this riddle there is no clue in Shaw's recent pronouncement that a writer "is engaged in the long process of putting his whole life on paper; he is on a journey and he is reporting in, giving his position at certain moments of that journey: 'This is where I think I am and this is what this...