Mr. Amis, quoting liberally from Solzhenitsyn, makes palpable the horrors of the gulag: from the 31 forms of psychological and physical torture that the author of the "Gulag Archipelago" enumerated to the bone-chilling daily grind of life in Soviet prison camps, where starvation and overcrowding were themselves a form of torture.
He did not take that rare stretch of quiet time in a hurried and fractured existence, (like say the long Memorial Day weekend at the outset of summer, ahem) to break up the pornography and punditry, and read a novel or a poem that makes palpable the horrors and heartbreak of war in a way that the Oxford History of Modern War, with all its canonical detail, cannot impart.
So look to the salamanders, objects that make the horror palpable.
It grabs you each and every time, it provokes the same palpable sense of horror and it makes us question the humanity of humanity.
The first is his liberation of language from meaning, given that the personal, palpable, physical and psychological horror of redundancy is now happily propagandised as "freedom".
When they bring Sean into the kitchen, frantically trying to save his life after being shot, Collette's horror is palpable.
These are eight- and nine-year-olds, mostly, and the impact of trauma and horror upon them is palpable.
He grew up in Detroit and his love for the city and its people are palpable, as is his grief for the horrors the city has endured.
Blame the upbringing, but he manifests a palpable distaste for power and status, alongside a horror of toeing the party line.
The updated report is a vivid chronicle of horrors, illustrated by crisp Google Earth photos that make the slave camps as palpable as suburban real estate on Zillow.
