Katherine Silver pulls off the near-impossible feat of translating the cacophony of thoughts, interjections and slang rattling around Demetrio's fevered brain, not to mention the continual asides of an arch narrator.
(Waif, and it can never be said enough, rhymes with trafe.) "Pushing Daisies" comes with an arch narrator and a lot of candy-colored, computer-generated bucolic scenery, and that alone could discourage dyspeptics and others allergic to even the faintest hint of magical realism.
When space is filled with satellites, all the world becomes a proscenium arch, the narrator of the McLuhan movie suggested.
You can get an idea of the novel's rich peculiarity from its first sentence, which will strike some readers as fey or arch, but which its narrator (who remains nameless) offers quite matter-of-factly: "In answer to a question you asked a long time ago, I have, yes, seen through what you called the gauze of this life".
The last two describe Lady Daniels, the first and more arch of our two narrators, who is introduced speculating about the uniform attractiveness of valley girls ("the beauty's in the tap water").
Gustav, the protagonist and first-person narrator, has an arch, Nabokovian wit, and the theories he serves up about life and ballooning are provocative and plentiful.
"The author" -- who resembles an arch, luridly sentimental version of the narrator of Fielding's "Tom Jones" -- makes himself conspicuous, guiding the reader like an overly solicitous and overstimulated host through the maze of the story.
Sometimes the reminders of the narrator's presence are thoroughly arch.
As the narrator draws "flying buttresses," "windows with arches" and "great doors," something inside him releases and he is suddenly freed — just by drawing those majestic architectural forms — from the banality of his life and his petty prejudices.
Though their similarities bound them together, in a crucial way the two dancers are different: Tracey has perfect arches and a gift for dance that the narrator simply doesn't.
Altamirano's arch and flowery language ("Yes, Readers of the Jury.... Oh, the tricks a poor narrator must resort to") mocks this tradition but fails to wrest itself free of it.
