Understanding more history from above would have made the suffering more profound and more noble as well, since it would have been made palpable that something was being fought for, that there was an unavoidable purpose beyond the pain.
Coetzee has always been a novelist of ideas made palpable -- made flesh, you might say.
In this début novel, Greer pinpoints the "tiny hidden madnesses in ordinary people" with unerring accuracy, and, in prose littered with sparks, makes palpable the longing for the celestial.
In the end, however, even these lapses do not diminish Ms. Sebold's achievements: her ability to capture both the ordinary and the extraordinary, the banal and the horrific, in lyrical, unsentimental prose; her instinctive understanding of the mathematics of love between parents and children; her gift for making palpable the dreams, regrets and unstilled hopes of one girl and one family.
Kaye makes palpable the pain that this rejection causes Florence.
The changes have already made a palpable difference.
This, combined with a temperament and artistic interests tailor-made for New York, makes Davis' palpable desire to lace 'em up in the World's Most Famous Arena feel genuine, even if the payoff is a fantastic gamble.
Eliot Spitzer's incredibly awkward Leno interview on Friday made headlines for its palpable awkwardness, but before Jay asked him how he could be so stupid for soliciting prostitutes while cracking down on people who did the same, the New York comptroller candidate exchanged a moment with his former "SNL" doppelganger, Bill Hader.
This is a central conundrum of a book that makes Obama's white parent palpable for the first time.
Yet Malick makes it palpable.
