Word: rome
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...credits. (The dust jacket informs us that Paola's photographs "adorn the book," quite a feat for a fictional character and no doubt a surprise to photographer David Robinson.) All is fine and dandy between the two, as uncovered in some badly written bedroom scenes, until Paola must leave Rome, where most of the novel is set, for the Mideast. There, she is to photograph the latest Arab-Israeli conflict (more Death...
Complications arise in Paola's absence he wants to employ: he careens between badly Beard's deceased wife Leonora starts telephoning him from England. She complains that he has forsaken her, that he has been duped by the doctors and that she, very much alive, is now coming to Rome. Beard is forced to cope with his guilt; he wonders if, like many widowers he is secretly happy to exchange an old wife for a young lover. After all, he asks, how much great literature has been created by widowers bemoaning the loss of their wife? (Burgess...
Still worse, Burgess cannot decide what style handled black humor and lyric descriptions of Rome in the fading twilight. The dialogue is virtually indefensible on any level, except perhaps that it befits Burgess' protagonist the hack screen writer (who talks like his scripts), but that defense falters, for it can't encompass all the other characters...
...facilities at the men's home in Vienna where a young and impoverished Hitler lived for three years just before World War I. Yet in larger matters Toland strays woefully from the record. He asserts that Hitler was "still a member in good standing of the Church of Rome" in 1941, the very time when Hitler was violently attacking Catholicism root and branch in his table conversation. Toland's literary pretensions do not help. A section on Hitler's ill health in 1941 is headed-incredibly -by an epigraph from Keats: "O what can ail thee, Knight...
Bowersock said there was no such thing as a middle class Roman. Wealthy upper class Romans managed to survive Rome's traumas by passing into the Church, according to Bowersock...