Kulish launches his clever, affecting novel as a fish-out-of-water narrative: a New York gossip columnist is sent to cover the Iraq war (that, or get fired for a libellous mistake) and is embedded with the Marines.
As a 2015 profile in Broadly explains, Calloway rose to Instagram fame by weaving a mouth-watering narrative around her life as a student at Cambridge University, pairing photos of the medieval town with lengthy captions about her adventures, friends, and her plucked-from-a-teen-movie love interest, Oscar.
For a memoir that is so much about water, its narrative, stop-start and heavily reliant on reminiscence, does not always flow.
Delay is of the essence of Waters's narrative method.
But there are no tricky conceits in this narrative: it's a fish-in-water story.
Shakespearean comedies yielded a narrative arc for his fish-out-of-water tale, "Paradise News" (1992).
Both are being superseded by the permanent European Stabnility Mechanism (some wonkish background is here)The downgrade pours cold water on the narrative that things are slowly but steadily getting better in the euro zone: growth is returning (slowly) and the emerging banking union will help redress the woes of the financial sector (see here and here for why it's not all it's made out to be).
Her family life, as seen on the documentary, is the counter-narrative: water fights, paint fights, an obsession with Barcelona football club and a lot of dancing.
But Alter's syntax goes off the rails when "God's breath hovering over the waters" is tacked onto a series of non-parallel nouns; by comparison, "And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters" is clearer narrative and great poetry.
Flashes of horror intrude into these calmer narrative waters: the apple- cheeked Serbian woman casually shot by Šehić's unit; the Bosnian comrade later castrated by Serbian paramilitaries; the sight of his childhood house torched, the hometown "a festival of ruins".
