Word: reader
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Vista del Amanecer, Cabrera's newest statement, published in 1974, is a grimly serious book, soaked with desperate humor. It is a collection of short pieces, difficult to define, few of them more than a page long, meditations on images in Cuban history. At worst they resemble Reader's Digest fillers, but at their best they are epiphanies. Each one presents a static image or a brief moment. To explain the colonial period, for example, they describe engravings: conquistadores meeting Indians, bloodhounds catching a runaway slave...
...armed only with machetes attacking a Spanish cavalry unit, some amazing apathy or some quite ordinary cowardice, he always deflates heroic claims that men control their destiny. Battles are planned with strategy and won by blind chance. So many of these incidents are simultaneously horrible and funny that the reader is only left wondering, or cynical...
...wasn't convinced. But she engaged me; you only have to read the book to see how engaging she can be. If she uses phrases like "And, listen" or "Truly, then" when addressing the reader in the preface, imagine what she was like in this echoing, reflecting space where we spoke. Despite my reservations, I found myself fighting the sort of verbal duel to which Fallaci loves to challenge others, and what is more, fighting with her own weapons: taking things she has said in different situations and putting them together to formulate her answer, attacking...
...admired: Golda Meir, Dom Camara, Alexandros Panagoulis--people you can portray as heroic. But these sections of the book are also those where you type of journalism reveals itself for what it is: fiction. Each of the 14 people in Interview with History is introduced so that the reader sees the individual as a symbol of something much bigger. Your technique encourages the reader to forget that you invented any symbolism you see. Then you proceed to back up your perception with "fact" through the interviews. It's all just too neat, everyone you interview fits just too perfectly into...
...Egotists, "What 0you hear when you have a face before you is never what you hear when you have before you a winding tape." There's even more difference between what you hear--a voice whose intonations tell you how to interpret what they say--and what the reader sees in print. And what about the process of selection? When, for example, Kissinger says in your interview (speaking of negotiations with Hanoi), "The fact is that...Well, for months we have been conducting these negotiations and you reporters haven't believed us." What is the fact? The reader...