Ferrante feels vivid to us as a character because there is so much continuity of thought from novel to novel, and in her biographical absence we are permitted to focus on that literary continuity.
An account of how he used to be voluntarily chased through the countryside by bloodhounds in all weathers verges on the farcical, and Askwith is sensible enough to understand that not all of his more sedentary readers will necessarily understand the thrill of what he describes, so his evocative descriptions of powering through the wild, unfettered landscape go a long way to making it feel vivid.
Polly Teale's production makes the clash of personalities and cultures feel vivid, but Sachs's concern with authenticity (both human and artistic) means he is trying to mine the same territory as Yasmina Reza's wildly successful Art, without really digging that far into either aesthetic questions or psychological ones.
Everyone felt something vivid, and disturbing.
It is the present that is the foreign country, or rather the alien planet, and as we get older we feel increasingly exiled from that homeland of the past where everything felt more vivid and real.
There was no violence in what my mother had done but it was the kind of incomprehension in that boy's face and the incomprehension on my mother's face that felt so vivid to me.
He hadn't thought of touching her, but when she shrieked at him he felt a vivid tingling in his hand, as if he'd slapped her face with all his strength; he stood away from her quickly, letting her go, then he slumped down onto the side of the bed.
The song 63,000 describes how their slave ancestors were brought to the Cape and conjures up how they lived and felt in vivid word pictures.
A truly big book is a perfect blend of inspired premise, larger-than-life characters, high-stakes story, deeply felt themes, vivid setting and much more.
