V2nd - chapter 11 - more examples

[Michael Bailey]

well, if not the tone, then the feel, the texture, something like that...

a) what's old Maijstral doing these days?  what kind of terms were he
and Paola on, before she left?  Maybe he's disabled, on relief.  It's
1956, "the mattress was begged from the Navy B.O.Q. shortly after the
war, the stove and food supplied by CARE, or the table from a house
now rubble....The room is in a building which had nine such rooms
before the war.  Now there are three....the other two-thirds of the
building were removed by the bombing, sometime during the winter of
1942-43."

what's the feel here?
- not a lot going on worth talking about, perhaps, except the past
- such extensive damages aren't quickly recovered from, and serve as a
reminder of what was lost (to him, but maybe not so much to those born
later)

b) "since shortly after you left, an occupant of the room"
factually very skimpy (where was he before she left?) but emotionally
laid on quite thick, especially since he's detailed exactly the
dimensions of the room -
and its nature.  And what it means to be in such a room. Oh, he's
tugging the heartstrings all right.
And she gets it.  She's also, perhaps, one of Malta's best and
brightest - in the next section, Fausto gives his reasons for such a
familial esprit, and they center on his own Crew of friends - so in a
way her acceptance into the WSC is inevitable, they are also embattled
but highly capable and driven near despair like the Generation of '37.
If there is an implicit reproach to any despair the current Crew
(including Paola) may feel, in the descriptions of the wartime Malta,
Fausto never draws the comparison.  But then, he doesn't have to, does
he?