Word: reader
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Parents who scorn the "See, See, See" tedium of "basal readers" have long cherished the story about the first-grade teacher who steps out of her wrecked car to cry, "Oh, Oh, Oh-Damn, Damn, Damn." Now the gag has grown to an entire parody of the best-known reader, Fun with Dick and Jane. At this month's convention of the National Education Association, delegates happily passed around the anonymous spoof, Fun with Hamlet and His Friends. Excerpts...
...reader who stays with the story long enough to become intrigued, these digressions to the object world are effective catalysts of suspense. Jealousy, as a portrait of a state of mind, a tense suspicion (which the reader shares with the eye), never offers either the joyful release of action or the final assurance that A ... (for adultery? ) has really been unfaithful. It is like a murder mystery in which the reader hungrily studies the clues but never learns...
...Cummings. One of his earliest books, Passing Time, was a Robbe-Grilletesque effort to scramble time sequences. The hero keeps a double-entry diary in which accounts of what happened as far back as seven months ago mingle with impressions of the present. Like many writers. Butor feels readers are weary of both "I" and "he." His solution in A Change of Heart: to substitute "you." The device is hardly revolutionary, as any reader of syndicated Sports Columnist Jimmy Cannon knows (You are Sugar Ray. Your legs are wobbly, etc.). But through it Butor gains a considerable advantage over...
Many of their books, turgid with description, tormented by tricks, are all but unreadable. Most demand far more persistence than any reader (except, possibly, a fellow writer studying technique) will ever-or should ever-give. The plunging power of one outstanding Neo-Realist, Claude Simon, dissipates too often in Faulknerian tangles-1000-word sentences and sets-within-sets of parenthetical statements. Inevitably, too, as experimenters, Neo-Realists have wallowed in pretentious critical nonsense. Their mechanical techniques, almost inevitably, have allowed a number of non-novelists to masquerade as writers of fiction. Neo-Realist Marguerite Duras' pure conversational tour...
...Reivers, by William Faulkner. Like an old man yarning on the back stoop, a Nobel prizewinner indulges himself and the reader in a fond and very funny story...