The figures that seem the most interesting to me were La Senora, Mimi, and, of course, Eva Luna (I hope I was allowed to include Mimi in this list). I think that in the lives of these three women the struggle for personal and social success and fulfillment took especially dramatic character on the background of political chaos, financial hardships, and society controlled by men. ... She is more of a survivor than many men. ... Commercial magnates and the biggest political figures were on the list of her regular customers, as La Senora says with delight " there is enough corruption for ever...

• Word Count: 2213
• Approx Pages: 9
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

Gandhi's declaration of a state of internal emergency, the book turns first toward the Parsi community in an unidentified city by the sea that resembles Bombay, but its plot opens up to embrace other characters and to expand the settings. ... Instead, he has turned their lives into a metaphor that stands for the human experience: the fears, the joys, the ambitions and failures, the terror and the conflicts, finally the sense of balance that once attained will allow the characters to withstand the outer world, a world awash with dangers to personal fulfillment and identity. ... There i...

• Word Count: 4675
• Approx Pages: 19
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

Gandhi's declaration of a state of internal emergency, the book turns first toward the Parsi community in an unidentified city by the sea that resembles Bombay, but its plot opens up to embrace other characters and to expand the settings. ... Instead, he has turned their lives into a metaphor that stands for the human experience: the fears, the joys, the ambitions and failures, the terror and the conflicts, finally the sense of balance that once attained will allow the characters to withstand the outer world, a world awash with dangers to personal fulfillment and identity. ... There i...

• Word Count: 4673
• Approx Pages: 19
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

Eco's Postscript is also a manifesto proclaiming the authority of serious historical fiction: the characters in a historical novel may not appear in encyclopedias, he notes, but everything they do could only occur in that time and place. Made-up events and characters tell us things "that history books have never told us so clearly," so as "to make history, what happened, more comprehensible"(p. 75). ... He further perplexes ordinary readers with the linguistic challenges of numerous snatches of classical and medieval Latin, French, and German, not to mention the peculiar polyglot speech o...

• Word Count: 4697
• Approx Pages: 19
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: Undergraduate