Marilynne Robinson's The Death of Adam is an essay collection by the author of the acclaimed novel Giliad. The essays in the book fall into two main categories, as Robinson describes in the preface. Some of them are dedicated to pointing out foolishness and ugliness where modern thought presumes wisdom and beauty. Such is, for example, the essay Darwinism.
[...] But one does not feel the presence of the mot juste in this book as one does in the books of writers who have accepted their place in a clear tradition, writer who protect the clarity of underlying ideas and cherished people by exact and painstaking referents. Instead, Robinson's diction spiritedly embodies a real creativity. Hers is a vocabulary-enriching prose. Surprising and expertly precise words fill her pages. In the preface alone I collected the following treasures: “dysphemism,”[1] “irrefragable,”[2] and “ontogeny.”[3] Another source of Robinson's rarefaction is her frequent use of asyndeton. [...]
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