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From: "Alice Turner" <al@interport.net> Subject: (urth) Suzanne Date: Sat, 9 May 1998 18:17:07 >I hate to pour cold water on your theories, especially since this story >has always mystified me [snip] I think "loosely grouped" means >only that the girls are posed as if in the middle of cooking, rather than >lined up in rows as is usual. > >I really would like an explanation for this story. The best I've been >able to do is: if Suzanne's daughter had really been as strikingly >beautiful as the story's next-to-last paragraph describes, then the >narrator would certainly have noticed Suzanne. Ergo, the daughter is >really not so remarkable, and the flowery prose of the description >reflects the sentimentality of a lonely middle-aged man. But if that's >all there is to it, it's not much of a story. And the way Wolfe writes >it, it feels to me that there should be some greater payoff. I tend to go along with Adam's explanation here, but I don't agree that it diminishes the story. I think there is something powerful and poignant about a middle-aged man's shock of realization that his entire life could have been entirely different, had it not been for the coincidences of fate. I think you're all looking too hard for a fantasy element. The godfather of this story is Proust (and for once that is proven, not conjectural), not Kafka or Borges. The flavor of regret is bittersweet. -alga- *More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/