Word: reader
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...Muriel Spark's latest novel, slides by with the elegant concision of a parable. Spark's economical narration, piercing judgment, and marvelous ear give her story the easy-to-watch quality of a cartoon, while the explicit statement of her concerns evokes a depth which is left for the reader to supply. Reading her novel is like looking at the reflections on the surface of a slow, but full and moving stream...
...Daria endures Ross's increasing verbal abuse and fiendish behavior long past the moment when the reader wants to hurl the book at the wall, she gradually becomes aware that in their 22 years of marriage, she has never known what exactly he does, besides lawyering. Turns out he's involved in all sorts of sordid and shady dealings--with two of her brothers involved, no less...
...same manner, Piercy deals minimally with the complex web of anger and guilt, love and mistrust that a divorce must create for Daria's daughters. The reader feels cheated, suspecting that if she only gave it attention, this author could produce some memorable fiction. Instead, Robin is on Ross's side and Tracy on Daria's, and, Io and behold, it all works...
While it is possible that Updike does not entirely share the Manichean simplicity of this witch's views, he does nothing to counteract the reductionist view of virtue as the lack of strength. The reader feels that Updike's vision although concerned with goodness, does little to characterize just what comprises and defeats...
...bitter and funny, set in Argentina nearly ten years ago during that country's period of paramilitary repression. Left wing violence triggered a savage righ wing reaction, a protracted spasm of bloodthirstiness and fear among the police and the military. To be a professor, a student, a known reader of books, or even to be associated distantly with anyone who might be stigmatized as an intellectual, was to risk joining the "disappeared ones," which meant to be seized, bound, tortured, murdered and thrown into secret graves...