Word: reader
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...promise made and understood here is, of course, that the reader is in the hands of a fine storyteller, whose tale, after many turnings, will end as it should. The turnings are traditional. The title figure, a beautiful, not very experienced young Scotswoman, arrives in London to work in the war effort. She and the pilot, Peter Gregory, meet and have a brief, rather restrained romance. Then he disappears on a flight to provision a Resistance group...
...already been labeled brilliant by the likes of conservative icon Norman Podhoretz. The youngest of three sisters from a suburb of Milwaukee, Wis., Shalit first gained national attention in 1995 as a sophomore at Williams College, when she wrote a piece for Commentary (later reprinted in Reader's Digest) attacking the school's coed bathrooms. But her precocity did not necessarily make her Miss Popularity. Her conservative views made her so despised by many on campus that her parents pleaded with her to transfer. Shalit, now a writer living in New York City, also is better known to the cognoscenti...
...characters, Baricco never manages to develop a plot or instill any warmth in the story. In attempting to sound poetic, the bizarre rhythm of the novel is instead cold and-self-consciously intellectual. The characters are presented in such an obscure way that they never seem real to the reader, and the entire story passes in a dream-like blur of images and events...
Baricco attempts to take the reader to a fantasy world along with the characters, and at times his haunting style does create an ocean-like rhythm. But when the inn elevates from the ground and disappears on the final page, the reader is left unsatisfied and even unsure of what thebook was all about in the first place...
...words"a novel" appear on the cover of Memoirs ofa Geisha, the novel begins with a translator'snote, convincingly signed by "Jakob Haarhuis,Arnold Rusoff Professor of Japanese History, NewYork University." The story begins from there asthe ever hopeful, bitterly realistic voice ofSayuri takes over, and the reader finds himself sotaken by the enveloping prose, quietly blendingthe "superlative degree of comparison" present inDickens's opening in A Tale of Two Citieswith the seducing party-haze of wealth and a longafternoon that Fitzgerald so successfully employsin The Great Gatsby, that he soon sheds hiscritical eye and sinks deeper into the sofa...