Word: stingo
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...book, the young Southern narrator, Stingo (Peter MacNicol)--evidently based on Styron himself learns only gradually that the beautiful woman who lives upstairs in his boardinghouse is haunted by a terrible past. Extended flashbacks, shot on location in Europe with English subtitles, slowly unfold the extent of that terror up to Sophie's final and tragic "choice," so that the viewer's reactions parallel Stingo's own. Longer than the conventional flashback, these sequences demonstrate Pakula's scrupulous care in reproducing Styron's tone. An actual concentration camp in Yugoslavia forms the background, and Meryl Streep as Sophie appears with...
...Camille at Auschwitz, the beautiful woman with a guilty secret, twice torn between two people she dearly loves, first in Poland, then in New York. Her catastrophic past has given her mercurial moods: giddy with ecstasy at the antics of her lover Nathan (Kevin Kline) and her puppy pursuer Stingo (Peter MacNicol), then darkly ruminative as memory provides her with waking nightmares. Even as sketched by Styron in overwrought prose, Sophie wove a spell over millions of readers...
...author had a sentimental fascination for the raffish life of New York and Paris. His best-known character is Colonel John R. Stingo, a bombastic Tunes Square denizen. But Liebling is best remembered by other journalists for his enviable style. In 1972 More, The New York Journalism Review congratulated itself on its first birthday by holding the "A.J. Liebling Counter-Convention," a salute to the godfather of New Journalism...
Said stalk is the cynosure of his existence--he refers to it every three pages, usually by way of some juvenile periphrasis: "doughty love-muscle," or "priapism," or "stallionoid condition." "My membrum," he writes, "betrousered, is truly rampant." Stingo gets drunk on two beers, runs from any sort of danger or disturbance, ejaculates prematurely--he is, in short, what the Jews he loves to stereotype would call a nebbish, the kind of person who, when he enters a room, gives the impression that seven people just left...
There is nothing wrong in general with the nebbish-as-protagonist, as Joyce amply demonstrated in The Dubliners. But when the author relies on us to see the staggering evil of the holocaust through his eyes, he needs to give the protagonist some kind of stature; Stingo crumbles under the weight of the apocalypse...