Word: reader
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AMIS USES A variety of devices to maintain a sense of alienation between the reader and the action. The least successful of these are the narrator's occasional clumsy interjections. For example, when Keith, the dwarf, contemplates his feet bloodied by the nails which protrude from his makeshift elevator shoes, the narrator intrudes with, "Well, we're sorry about it Keith, of course, but we're afraid that you simply had to be that way. Nothing personal, please understand--merely in order to serve the designs of this particular fiction...
Sykes himself, the reader comes to feel, is just the sort of decent, humane, gentlemanly, put-upon hero-victim of Waugh's fiction. Waugh is the kind of absurd caricature, impossible in real life, who people these books. So the biography reads strangely like one of Waugh's own novels, with the same absurd dialogue, incredible anecdotes, and moments of high pathos...
...Burnam is more utilitarian than American Credo and is barely winged by Benchley, it is because his compendium contains more truth and less malice than its predecessors. The Dictionary of Misinformation misleads only once -in its title. Information is all that the volume contains: enough to keep the canny reader collecting bar bets for the rest of the year. Stefan Kanfer
Godlike Genius. In a Christie murder mystery, neatness not only counts, it is everything. As the genre's undisputed queen of the maze, she laid her tantalizing plots so precisely and dropped her false leads so cunningly that few-if any-readers could guess the identity of the villain. The reader surrenders to an enigma in which the foul act of murder seems less a sin against man or God than a breach of etiquette...
DARROCH'S BIOGRAPHY leaves the reader with the same sense of confusion--a sense that somewhere the real Ottoline is still hiding behind the draperies of her acquaintances. At the end of the book, one can almost understand her; but the promise of knowing her fully still teases us. She spent her life trying to breach the defenses of those around her, but ultimately she could not reveal her own emotions. She expressed her energy as an intellectual phenomenon, unable to get to the passion beneath. As a result, her relationships ended with rejection of her domination. "How inaccessible...