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Title: Review: a review
Review: Presents on the surface as a murder mystery/thriller, but that is so not the point. The point is the most wonderful satire of literary theory since ThePooh Perplex, and of academic politics since, well, forever. Grudin has great fun playing around with language, couching different chapters in different voices (first, second, third), genres (narrative, nonfiction, drama, Q & A, etc.), marginal notes and footnotes (the footnotes attempt a takeover in Chapter 9, but are brutally suppressed--the marginalia tried to give warning!). I was going to ding Grudin a point for giving the novel Sovrana Sostrata a PR classification instead of a PS, but I take it back for the all-too-plausible postal abbrev for his fictional state of Washagon.
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