Word: reader
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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Allyn attempts to give an entire history of American sexuality in a brief chapter, as if to acquaint the reader with all of the legends and values the sexual revolution attempts to destroy. While rhetorically intelligent, Allyn's pseudo-academic style makes his statements appear utterly ridiculous. Among the fine points of his introduction are such highly stylized claims as, "The sexual revolutionaries of the sixties and seventies were the truest of leaders. They made people realize that the future does not have to look like the past." The entire book is replete with sweeping claims about American society...
...This is especially evident in his adept handling of a rape that transpires between Altenburg waitress Connie Schubert and nomadic American real estate salesman, Harry Nelson. The reader is left partially eroticized, partially violated, yet wholly satisfied after a mere six pages...
...commentary that is being made. The Wall is down, but westernization is not restitution enough, leaving more wanderers than homesteaders. Indeed, Schulze's world is more bazaar than bizarre. But this is hardly to say that it's bargain basement Kafka. Rummaging through the apparently artless language leads the reader to discover a finely crafted plot, a great conversation piece for years to come. But admittedly, some of the stories are more worthy of chit-chat than legend...
...perhaps it is the complete lack of the epic scale that hurts the book as a whole. It would take a particularly patient reader to digest the 29 stories in one sitting but an even more intent reader to manage to surmise the complex connections between the vignettes, which are often too based on moniker relations rather than convergence of plot or metaphor. Often one finds the need for a family tree, a flow chart to keep straight the characters...
Horse Heaven is basically a book of vignettes that only occasionally interlock, and the real challenge for the reader is keeping all those characters, human and equine, straight. There is Justa Bob, a good-natured gelding who knows how to race, and Epic Steam, a stallion badly in need of a gelding. There is Buddy Crawford, a sleazy trainer who cares more about winning than about the horses (even after he finds Jesus), and Farley Jones, who adheres to The Tibetan Book of Thoroughbred Training ("Do not see any fault anywhere...Do not hanker after signs of progress"). There...