But there's humour here, too, in the extremity and abjectness of Noble's behaviour.
My connection to Jo was hard-forged in the extremity of my grief and will probably survive time and distance.
The turbulence of his era emerges in the extremity of his writings.
Instead, it drags the reader along by the sheer energy of its prose, its surreal-to-the-point-of-implausible plot and several extravagant set pieces that, in the extremity of their vision, recall Ballard or Burroughs.
James Meek's previous novel, "The People's Act of Love," was set in the extremity of the Russian Revolution and was one of the best-reviewed books of 2006, according to Metacritic, an online compiler of criticism.
"What illumination — moral, psychological, social — can be provided of either [extreme situations] or the general human condition by a writer so deeply rooted in the extremity of her plight?" he asks.
And in each, his derangement is embodied in the extremity of his partnering, the vicious self-disgust with which he throws around his terrified wife, the violent lifts, twists and plunges that mark his journey to sensual exhaustion with his mistress Mary Vetsera.
There is the man whom we all know, stupid, unimaginative, whose brain is bitten numbly by numb maggots; who walks generously with wide-spread, tentative legs, falls frequently in the gutter, and who sees, in the extremity of his ecstasy, blue mice and pink elephants.
He sat collapsed in the front pew, his clothes mismatched and his limbs splayed in the extremity of his grief, looking as if he'd been dropped there from a great height, like a bird stripped of its feathers in some aerial catastrophe.
The extremity of the weather finds an echo in the extremity of life in the city itself: there is war in the Caucasus, unease on the streets after a terrorist bombing campaign and gossip about the ailing Yeltsin giving way to Putin, a former K.G.B. hardliner, a succession that would take place, symbolically, on the very last day of the old century.
Immediately following acute deformation, we remained alert for compartment syndrome and perfusion problems in the extremity.
