But the novel's true preoccupation is social history, and it powerfully evokes the changes of recent decades.
Though the story struggles under the weight of its many symbols — ghostly coyotes, crucifix-like cacti, 9/11, alien spaceships, the Sea of Galilee — it powerfully evokes the sense of being an outsider.
It powerfully evoked my childhood in the nineteen-forties, when there was no television and families sat around in the evening listening to the radio — in the case of my family, to classical music.
It powerfully evoked my childhood in the nineteen-forties, when there was no television and families sat around in the evening listening to the radio in the case of my family, to classical music.
It powerfully evoked a deep disillusionment in North Vietnam, which it depicted as a militarily victorious but spiritually wounded civilization ruled over by a self-satisfied, cliche-spouting Marxist bureaucracy.
Maybe everyone knows people, from childhood or adolescence, who are natural leaders, who inspire confidence — a variety of leadership that finds its most traditional existential test in battle but that rises to the surface wherever groups form and troubles arise — and Cretton powerfully evokes it, building it into a sense of promise, of future possibilities.
Maybe everyone knows people, from childhood or adolescence, who are natural leaders, who inspire confidence a variety of leadership that finds its most traditional existential test in battle but that rises to the surface wherever groups form and troubles arise and Cretton powerfully evokes it, building it into a sense of promise, of future possibilities.
Sequestered from the main gallery traffic, the work, with its minimal staging, powerfully evokes the passage of untold individuals onto the shallow white cushion where, presumably, their unconscious unraveled through the backward tunnel Freud termed "primary process".
We have seen it before, more powerfully evoked in movies that stick to the basics and don't rely on historical metaphors that are the intellectual equivalent of a bogus séance.
Still, the book powerfully evokes the claustrophobic isolation of its heroine, unprepared for "a world full of people who want to know what you will be, what is your skill and what is your purpose".
But she powerfully evokes the disbelief, fury and uncharacteristic terror that came with being outed.
