This book’s purpose is to demonstrate that the mass of men and women do not have to spend their lives limited by the critical voices of mental spectators-those little tyrants rattling around inside their heads, telling them second by second how to fight their battles, what they can and cannot do, what they must and must not do.
Added by: sistercurare | Karma: 7.02 | Fiction literature | 26 November 2011
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This is the third book of Jeffrey Eugenides, an American author of Greek origin also famous for Middlesex (which won the Pulitzer Prize) and Virgin Suicides (made into a movie by Sofia Coppola) It’s the early 1980s—the country is in a deep recession, and life after college is harder than ever. In the cafés on College Hill, the wised-up kids are inhaling Derrida and listening to Talking Heads. But Madeleine Hanna, dutiful English major, is writing her senior thesis on Jane Austen and George Eliot, purveyors of the marriage plot that lies at the heart of the greatest English novels.
When eighth-grader San Lee moves to a new town and a new school for the umpteenth time, he doesn't try to make new friends or be a loner or play cool. Instead he sits back and devises a plan to be totally different. When he accidentally answers too many questions in World History on Zen (only because he just had Ancient Religions two schools ago) all heads turn and San has his answer: he's a Zen Master. And just when he thinks everyone (including the cute girl he can't stop thinking about) is on to him, everyone believes him . . . in a major Zen way.
When someone orders a black rose for Abby's old law school nemesis, Professor "Snapdragon" Puffer, her plans for a speedy delivery are foiled when he catches her putting the bloom on his desk and sends it straight into the trash. So she heads back in to retrieve her dignity and her flower-only to find the rose now decorating a dead professor, and herself the prime suspect...
