Word: reader
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Above all, the reader encounters an amazingly wide-ranging mind. Economics for Smith was only one interest of the philosopher-"whose trade it is not to do any thing, but to observe every thing." Accordingly, he discusses the intellectual underpinnings of government, education, religion, even artistic freedom (the state, he wrote, should give "entire liberty to all those who . . . would attempt, without scandal or indecency, to amuse and divert the people by painting, poetry, music, dancing"). Among his opinions...
This is the climax, all right, and the narrator baldly explains what it means: "Through him she was embracing her father's murderers. It was what she had always wanted." As a moment of realization it comes straight out of the blue for one thing, only the most attentive reader will recall at this point that Julie's father has been mentioned. It bears all the earmarks of a shattering revelation: Julie breaks down post coitum and sobs, the weather obliges with a rainstorm to maintain the right mood, and the chapter comes to an end. But it is revelation...
Mehring purchases his farm as a tax write-off, but it gradually grows on him -and on the reader. Soon the African earth and its plowman conspire to give the novel its center and its soul. The lyricism cannot last. Mehring cracks up principally because the author must punish the undertow of racism that tugs at all his small virtues. To bring about the denouement, Gordimer resorts to a trick best relegated to gothic potboilers: the corpse that will not stay put. The body of a black man, apparently murdered, appears on Mehring's land. He has it buried...
...like many an Englishman, he seems to owe more kindness and wisdom to his nanny than to his parents. The book shows greater nostalgia for the land around Crotch-ford, the family place near Ashdown Forest, than for the world's most famous stuffed animals. But yes, dear reader, the Six Pine Trees, the Hundred Acre Wood, Galleon's Lap (where Pooh and C.R. said their last goodbye), Christopher Robin's tree house and the Pooh-sticks Bridge were real. The book offers photographs juxtaposed against E.H. Shepherd's matchless drawings to prove it. The animals...
...Frank reports, one of Garland's children begged her to make a promised stage appearance, if only for a group of wistful paraplegics. Judy's reply: "If they can wheel them in, they can wheel them out." Such anecdotes diminish both biographer and biographee and make the reader wonder why this sorrowful woman was worth 700 pages of heavy industry. Is the neon gossip meant to illuminate the warts, Judy and all? Or is it the mandatory downer for some future wide-screen version of Garland starring, say, Liza Minnelli...