Word: reader
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...pages of poetry, too-as difficult and rewarding. Gordimer's structure demands ingenuity and patience. It's choppy--long descriptions interspersed with telegraphic bits of interior monologue and haphazard conversation. She switches perspectives to let Rosa explain how she sees herself and how she believes others see her. The reader has to fit it all together, compose a life out of these poetic fragments...
...novel. The noise deafens; Barth blushes. With reason--many an atrocity litters Letters's past, including the authorial analogues of incest, cannibalism and flagellation. But what Barth does in the privacy of his own imagination is his own business; the worst atrocity he reserves for the hapless reader. The siren call of Barth's in-souciance, his cleverness, his recklessness, beckons you towards a grinding crash on the rocks surrounding these 750 pages, and a lonely death...
Perhaps; but such an author wastes little of that love on his reader...
...affair of Lady Amherst and Mensch holds the reader's chief interest and sympathy because it's the most coherent and human part of Letters; the other characters dance a contorted jig about it, A. B. Cook III and his descendant A. B. Cook VI send their unborn children endless genealogical accounts of the family's intrigues, centering around the War of 1812. Jerome Bonaparte Bray, part dictator, part human fly, part servant of a computer, plots a Second American Revolution. Todd Andrews--still alive, despite The Floating Opera's denouement--writes to his dead father contemplating a second suicide...
...prefigures a Second American Revolution; the decline of the profession of letters; the Maryland shore, scene of most of the action; the waning of the Indian tribes; others too numerous to mention. Except for the fleeting pleasure of realizing Barth is up to something, these associations offer the attentive reader nothing but work, and the lazy, nothing...