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Dictation: A Quartet
Cynthia Ozick
#UC0272
Hardcover, 179 pages; 2008
$24.00
 Members' Price: $20.40
Cynthia Ozick’s latest book consists of four intelligent stories that lead the reader playfully through winding paths of plot. The title story presents a fictional scheme by the secretaries of Henry James and Joseph Conrad to make their own mark on literature by surreptitiously inserting bits from each writer’s current work into that of the other’s before manuscripts are sent to their respective publishers. In “Actors,“an aging and often unemployed character actor is offered a Lear-like role, and then is stalked by the deceased playwright’s father, on whom the role is based. “At Fumicaro“takes an American literary critic to Mussolini’s Italy for a conference. He falls in love with a teenaged chambermaid, whom he first meets as she is vomiting in his room’s toilet. In the final story, “What Happened to the Baby,“a young college student keeps tab on her eccentric, intellectual uncle at her mother’s request, and inadvertently unravels a family myth. Ozick’s work intoxicates with its intellectual approach to fascinating story lines.
(EE)
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