Like much of Mr. Roth's recent work, "The Human Stain" bursts with characters and ideas, and its apparently haphazard organization disguises an elegant and cunning narrative strategy.
And Odysseus, that god-like man who possessed "a poet's charm for bringing the past to life" through his cunning narrative skills, is always at the centre of the maelstrom: wilful, arrogant, irrepressible, indomitable both as story-teller and man of action.But that indomitability is only part of the cunning truth.
According to historian Thomas Ohlgren your story needs to involve daring deeds, vile villains, adventurous chases, disguises, tricks, cunning and narrative suspense.
The show is built on a helix of stories of love, betrayal and cunning, sharing more narrative lineage with "The Godfather" than "Seabiscuit".
She was reluctant to admit that this might be evidence of any narrative cunning on her part, but this seemed more like an unwillingness to use a certain literary-critical vocabulary.
The selections include a series of 6 "Moravian Choruses" that Janacek adapted from Dvorak vocal duets; 19 nursery rhymes as gleefully anthropomorphic as his opera "The Cunning Little Vixen"; dramatic narratives; and a sober, rather abstract elegy written after the death of his 20-year-old daughter.
Nuances of faith, politics and sexual identity enrich the narrative while David Raedeker's cunning photography aggressively beautifies the cement-and-convenience store landscape.
The psychology of "Cyrano de Bergerac" is as cunning as its storytelling; in the narrative of Cyrano's eloquent but unrequited love for his cousin Roxane (Jennifer Garner), the play traps a much deeper commentary on self-loathing and the humiliated heart.
It is very difficult to generate much narrative intensity from this polyphony, however cunning its author may be.
This book, like his Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Moll Flanders (1722), is more contrived and cunning than it appears, and the hurried, unshaped narrative is the product of careful preparation and selective ordering.
Evans's subway photos were taken at furtive angles, with his lens hidden in the buttonhole of his coat and an operating cable up his sleeve; Ruhl's narrative strategy is similarly oblique and cunning, and she aspires to a kind of reportorial anonymity.
