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| - | + | Just finished Nathan Englander's The Ministry of Special Cases. Story of an osuactt Jewish couple torn apart by the government-sanctioned disappearance (abduction, torture, and murder) of their only child, during the last Argentine dictatorship. Yiddish-English dictionary needed occasionally, gentle reader, for gentile readers. Englander is a wonderful writer; I found it hard to put this one down.Have moved on to S.J. Perelman's The Last Laugh. Mostly stuff I remember reading in the New Yorker, back in the 1970s. The second part of the tome consists of his barely-started autobiography with the topical Perelmanesque title The Hindsight Saga. I read that first, as its beginning chapter is about the Marx Brothers. The following two chapters are about his famous brother-in-law Nathanael West and Perelman's friendship with Dorothy Parker. I find myself spending a lot of time rolling on the floor laughing, with occasional breaks to look up some of Uncle Syd's remarkable vocabulary in my unabridged. | |
Just finished Nathan Englander's The Ministry of Special Cases. Story of an osuactt Jewish couple torn apart by the government-sanctioned disappearance (abduction, torture, and murder) of their only child, during the last Argentine dictatorship. Yiddish-English dictionary needed occasionally, gentle reader, for gentile readers. Englander is a wonderful writer; I found it hard to put this one down.Have moved on to S.J. Perelman's The Last Laugh. Mostly stuff I remember reading in the New Yorker, back in the 1970s. The second part of the tome consists of his barely-started autobiography with the topical Perelmanesque title The Hindsight Saga. I read that first, as its beginning chapter is about the Marx Brothers. The following two chapters are about his famous brother-in-law Nathanael West and Perelman's friendship with Dorothy Parker. I find myself spending a lot of time rolling on the floor laughing, with occasional breaks to look up some of Uncle Syd's remarkable vocabulary in my unabridged.