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224 pages, Paperback
First published February 12, 2013
now that the saga has entered its fifth year and I have given up waiting for it to stop, I find myself simply wanting to make sense of it. Why is this happening? What does it mean? I want to understand this tormentor of mine who knows the workings of my mind so intricately and uses them so cleverly to make me suffer. I want, as St Augustine said, ‘to comprehend my comprehender’. I want to know what she thinks she is doing...Why is she devoting so much time and energy to making and pressing and elaborating these accusations? What happened – between us, or to her alone – to make my unremarkable existence matter so much to her?
"It comes from our favorite Tintin book, The Blue Lotus, or, as I have somehow permitted myself to call it, The Brue Rotus; regressing, in my son's company, to the soft racism that pervaded the world of my own childhood, where nobody thought twice about mimicking foreign accents for a cheap laugh. The Tintin books, being all about encounters with foreigners, encourage this kind of low humor when it comes to reading them aloud. They contain a great deal of the comic racial stereotyping characteristic of their time. Being of my own time, I have felt obliged to talk about this with my son, explaining to him that the comedy is okay only because it is directed equally at all cultures, including Tintin's own, and because it is also largely without malice."