She is very good at conveying the nauseous wretchedness of her life: the strain of concealing the truth from her son, or rather the strain of behaving as if the truth does not exist, since it would be impossible to explain.
She becomes a beautiful, but melancholy woman in the light of her own marital disaster, and then her sadness assumes a tragic dimension in the wretchedness she experiences after her beloved father dies, and sees how her own son has been encouraged by her ex-husband to think of her feelings and her family as irrelevant.
While faulting Ohlin for the purported wretchedness of her metaphors, he squeezes out such memorable phrases as "flies around like kites in a waning zephyr," "stiffened in a morgue of mentation" and "the cosmos takes on a coruscated import".
For a while, last fall, as she began her climb out of rage and wretchedness, she had brought friends back with her for lunch.
Her faith in beauty is brutally tested by the scamming, the wretchedness and not least by her own fear as a foreign patient in a strange hospital -- or, as an American, being told that it's not quite patriotic to want her own apartment back.
Eurídice, eager to escape the wretchedness of the northeastern bush, sold her watch, a donkey and her portraits of the saints to buy space on a pau de arara, a rickety open-ended truck with boards for seating.
Many of the film's most powerful moments seem to belong in a more serious, less ironised film: especially Aviva's tearful wretchedness, as she listens to her mother's anguished advocacy for abortion, no matter how much she wants her child.
As Bruno Maddox put it in a review for the New York Times, Hitchens concluded that Mother Teresa was "less interested in helping the poor than in using them as an indefatigable source of wretchedness on which to fuel the expansion of her fundamentalist Roman Catholic beliefs".
