Monday, October 16, 2006

Call the tech guy – the Reviewtron 3000 is on the fritz again...

Can somebody please explain what this means? (From Michelle Berry's review of Adam Lewis Schroeder's new novel in the past Saturday's Globe):
Harry is funny and mean and intelligent and dumb and tender. In 1942, he is a strong-willed sailor with a deep love of jazz, then, in the camps, he is light-headed from hunger and has lost his eyesight from beriberi.

So, he's not only intelligent and dumb, but funny, mean, tender, strong-willed, jazz-loving, light-headed, and blind as well?

Or this?:

Harry's 1995 travels in Thailand, at the end of the book, take on a surreal feel as he stumbles through his past and confronts people he didn't know existed. This is a scattered first-person narrative that is brilliantly written. With dry wit and intense emotional longing, Harry moves the reader around his world, his past, the war and what happened to men and women back then. Memory comes in fragments. Even if it is linear and presented chronologically, memory scatters and moves around with emotion.

Memory moves around with emotion, in scattered fragments that are linear and chronological?

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