Word: reader
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...reader is perhaps impressed with the idea that this statement of problems leads to a pessimism concerning China's future, that China is hopeless. But such is not the case. It is highly important that China's friends shall not be blind to these serious, fundamental, genuine difficulties. To do so is to play false to China's best interests. With few exceptions, however, foreigners who have been residents in China for a term of years agree that remarkable progress has been made by this wonderful people. By all odds the oldest civilization of our time, the most populous single...
...Matter" is the title of the last chapter; the reader is tempted to apply the phrase to the book. If life is utterly without meaning, if all action is absurd, why bother to talk about it? The answer is that the author does not necessarily believe this himself. He leaves us to assume that, although he has found no clue to life, he allows us, and occasionally himself to hope that there may nevertheless be some answer to the riddle...
...will be a hard boiled individual who will reach for a drink after reading "The Beautiful and Damned" at one sitting. The consumption of liquor in quarts per page is so tremendous that the reader sooner or later begins to sense the stale liquor smell and the motorman's glove taste of the morning after. Mr. Fitzgerald, to repeat, may have no such intention but he has succeeded in demonstrating pretty effectively that the pursuit of pleasure as the end of life may be at the beginning pretty delightful but is likely to prove less so as the highballs succeed...
...present Advocate, which I take as typical, are transitional; the old short-story formula is gone; the new is still in the making. Both pieces of work suffer from this lack of a guiding convention; the fancy is too unrestrained; the narrative elements are too scattered. They awaken the reader's interest in the persons of the event, the place of the event, but never in the event itself. In short, they are more essays than stories. Nevertheless, they both represent a striving after something far better than the vanished mode...
...contains memorable bits of description and forgettable bits of plat. The conscious morbidity of atmosphere is redeemed by a boisterous whimsicality that never falls into coarseness. The first picture is masterly; especially the enormous woman with her prodigious bonnet, quite overwhelming with its ribbands and its artificial plums." The reader's interest flags as the action increases. This is partly accounted for by the fact that we do not know whether the story takes place in the material or the supernatural world. If in the material, then the events are too marvelous for our acceptance; if in the supernatural, they...