Word: reader
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...reader of the World Almanac knows, disasters are usually ranked solely according to the number of lives lost. Writing in The Professional Geographer, Geography Professor Harold D. Foster at British Columbia's University of Victoria suggests that this kind of ranking is simplistic because it fails to take into account the psychological stress and environmental damage that survivors must cope with...
...develop; it meanders, circling around and turning in on itself - letting its contours be defined by the chaos of the heroine's psyche. Italicized chunks of Joan Foster's latest gothic romance pop up just when one is expecting the next chapter in her life. The reader is kept off balance by jagged shifts from the comfortable ordinariness of situation comedy to the casual cruelty of slapstick farce to the gripping panic of surreal nightmare...
Despite her oddities, Joan Foster becomes a character who genuinely engages the reader's sympathy and suggests that within every classically shaped woman there may be a ballooning romantic waiting to get out. She is also a useful vehicle for a meditation on the possibilities of modern fiction. In unobtrusive layers of allusion, Atwood pays homage to earlier forms of the novel - the picaresque, the gothic romance, the Bildungsroman and Victorian saga. She tries to shoehorn her heroine's life into the coherent contours of those forms, but Joan Foster won't sit still for the fitting...
Despite these insights, reading A Welfare Mother is an excruciatingly frustrating experience. The typical reader might mutter back at the author, "But what did she say?" The text is an ambling description that lacks any clues to the humanity behind the name Carmen Santana. It is written as a newspaper article, in crisp, clear, objective, unemotional prose, and from start to finish the journalistic facade never cracks...
Coin flip: tails. Very well, this neurasthenic little novel is a wicked parody. It mocks the genre of relentless felicity and refined sensibility, the kind of writing in which nothing happens but much is felt. "Her heart pressed up weakly against her ribs," the reader learns of Clara, a young working woman of the kind once called "spinster." Or "Clara felt slightly breathless as though the feebleness of the light was a sign of an ever-diminishing supply of oxygen." And (Clara, in perfect health, leaving a hotel) "Clara's ankles felt weak. There seemed no way she would...