While the globe is formally gratifying, the terrible subject matter, abstracted into the neutralized language of modern cartography, remains visually and emotionally remote.
Like a number of novels about the effects of wartime (J. L. Carr's "A Month in the Country" comes to mind), "The Lost Garden" refracts its terrible subject matter through the lens of the idyllic English countryside.
His characters were "archetypes of the varieties of Jewish pain," Wieseltier wrote, so "what remains is... a kind of elaborate superficiality which does justice neither to the author's intentions nor to his terrible subject matter".
Hair-raising things happen with terrible matter-of-factness.
"The Death of Mr. Lazarescu," for all its terrible matter-of-factness, produces tumultuous feelings of amazement and revolt.
What was the matter, what terrible thing was amiss?
I discovered that writing something down doesn't help, but writing it down and giving it to somebody to read helps, no matter what terrible thing has happened to me.
Our mind is still open on this terrible vital matter, but our heart is shut tight, and every instinct hollers that compulsory training is a wrong number.
Siddy Atkinson was pretty fit then and gave him a terrible hiding….no matter what we did to Finch, the bastard wouldn't talk" (Stannard 1988: 40).
"Violence is ugly, it looks terrible, no matter what," said Sgt. Nate Gafvert, President of the Mesa Police Association, told ABC 15. "Mr. Johnson was giving several indicators that he was going to resist arrest, that he was being verbally abusive to the officers.
