Kathryn Harrison is a wonderful writer. It seems important to get that on the table right away, since for most readers, her name will elicit one fact: Kathryn Harrison wrote a memoir about having slept with her father. Back in 1997, that notoriously hyper publicized book, "The Kiss"—in which she recounted an affair she had in her 20’s with the father she had not seen since she was a child—set critics scratching furiously at the welts it raised in the culture, largely neglecting the book in the process for its lurid cover story. Skip to next paragraphIn the hubbub, few pointed out that "The Kiss" is a pretty terrific memoir. Poetic and compressed, it is not a pointed finger, or an artless blurt, but a grimly hypnotic horror story, making human what might in other hands seem merely grotesque. That’s Harrison’s particular gift as a writer; and while her output, from memoirs and essays and novels, has been of varying quality, she has continually circled around her central, obsessive themes: narcissism, family violation, sexual taboo and physical suffering. For better or worse, this is a writer who veers toward what others find distasteful; in her novels, she has found parallel torments everywhere in history, from foot-binding in China ("The Binding Chair") to the Inquisition ("Poison").The setting of "Envy" is less exotic. Will Moreland, a New York psychoanalyst, thinks at once too much and too little. His son has died. His twin brother—a world-famous swimmer—is estranged. His wife is distant. In fact, everything in this grief-stained but otherwise normal existence feels a little distant, and Will himself appears, if not precisely unreliable, then slightly clueless. In his struggle to wriggle out from his own anxieties, his remarks can seem like witty meta-comments on the narrative itself: "Yes, he’s obsessed with sex. How else could he escape the inside of his head, where every thought refuses to be fleeting and instead waits its turn to be hyperarticulated, edited, revised and then annotated like some nightmare hybrid of Talmudic commentary and Freudian case study"In the spellbinding opening chapters, Will attends his college reunion and confronts an old girlfriend who may or may not have gotten pregnant by him years back. The ex is a grade-A wench, and their run-in is a startling rat-a-tat of mutual accusation. "Ironic that she’d become a dermatologist," Will thinks. "She’d always had a personality like a rash, itchy, chafing, the kind of woman who just won’t let you get comfortable." She ends the scene (and it does feel like a scene—the best elements of "Envy" are its most theatrical) with the fair-enough remark, "You are an excellent example of why it is that people think shrinks are nuts."The pages that follow ignore this electric showdown, or at least repress it. There’s a lot going on here, perhaps too much: a married couple drifting apart in grief, tension between Will and his philandering father, identical twins with non identical faces, a patient whose seductive behavior spills insistently over the edges of her shrink’s couch. And despite Will’s agitated attempts to interrogate the meaning of his life, he is surrounded by people who would prefer that he stop his inquiries immediately. As much detective as psychoanalyst, he’s too blinded by over thinking to give in to his own intuition.Then abruptly, with one traumatic sexual sequence, these disparate story lines cohere to reveal a new pattern: a Rorschach plot, in essence. The book’s muted family problems become elements in a Greekish tragedy, one filled with the tropes of sexual violation for which Harrison is best known. It’s like one of those souvenir 1950’s pens that tilt upside down to strip an innocent cheesecake model to her pornographic double, and Harrison’s witty, lucid, poetic sentences do carry us quite a long way through passages rife with the kind of ickiness bound to alienate some readers and rivet others.Unfortunately, her consistently skillful descriptions aren’t quite enough to make the novel pay off in the end. As heightened as this hidden plot turns out to be, it is frustratingly formulaic at its deepest level. It’s a dream horror that finally feels all too dreamlike, too embeddedly symbolic to have the pang of real life. And when the villain of the book is unmasked—and there is a villain, as blackhearted as a medieval troll—it’s disappointing to find a sociopath standing behind that particular door. So rank an antagonist renders the whole question of analytical motivation moot: the human flaws of the other characters pale by contrast; their struggles seem weightless next to such grave crimes.Still. there are standout moments here, mainly in the most chaotic and unmediated confrontations: the sequences, especially, in which a waifish, tattooed, sardonic, compulsively sexual graduate student is transformed into the world’s most disturbing therapy patient. What finally marks the book is Harrison’s abandonment of the tragic mode. After a series of lurid turns that would leave most families in seizures of distress, her characters do not collapse, or brutalize one another. Instead, they fulfill Will’s deepest psychoanalytic desires, and confess—reeling out monologues far less con vincing than the showdowns that came before. We are left with the loving attempts of well-meaning people to heal their wounds. In real life, that would be a beautiful ending; but in a novel soaked so deeply in horror, it feels too much like wishful thinking. The central points in Kathryn Harrison’s works doesn’t include () narcissism, family violation, sexual taboo and physical suffering.
A. excessive love of oneself.
B. forbidden sexual relationships
C. sexual abuse
D. rapes happening in family
Smiling and dapper, Fazle Hasan Abed hardly seems like a revolutionary. A Bangladeshi educated in Britain, an admirer of Shakespeare and Joyce, and a former accountant at Shell, he is the son of a distinguished family, his maternal grandfather was a minister in the colonial government of Bengal; a great-uncle was the first Bengali to serve in the governor of Bengal’s executive council. Now he received a very traditional distinction of his own. a knighthood. Yet the organization he founded, and for which his knighthood is a kind of respect, has probably done more than any single body to upend the traditions of misery and poverty in Bangladesh. Called BRAC, it is by most measures the largest, fastest-growing non-governmental organization (NGO) in the world—and one of the most businesslike.Although Mohammed Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for helping the poor, his Grameen Bank was neither the first nor the largest microfinance lender in his native Bangladesh; BRAC was. Its microfinance operation disburses about $ 1 billion a year. But this is only part of what it does: it is also an Internet-service provider; it has a university; its primary schools educate 11% of Bangladesh’s children. It runs feed mills, chicken farms, tea plantations and packaging factories. BRAC has shown that NGOs do not need to be small and that a little-known institution from a poor country can outgun famous Western charities.None of this seemed likely in 1970, when Sir Faze turned Shell’s offices in Chittagong into a refuge for victims of a deadly cyclone. BRAC—which started as an acronym, Bangladesh Rehabilitation Assistance Committee, and became a motto, "building resources across communities"—surmounted its early troubles by combining two things that rarely go together: running an NGO as a business and taking seriously the social context of poverty.BRAC earns from its operations about 80% of the money it disburses to the poor (the remainder is aid, mostly from Western donors). It calls a halt to activities that require endless subsidies. At one point, it even tried financing itself from the tiny savings of the poor (is, no aid at all), though this drastic form of self-help proved a step too far. hardly any lenders or borrowers put themselves forward. From the start, Sir Fazle insisted on brutal honesty about results. BRAC pays far more attention to research and "continuous learning" than do most NGOs. David Korten, author of "When Corporations Rule the World", called it "as near to a pure example of a learning organization as one is likely to find. "What makes BRAC unique is its combination of business methods with a particular view of poverty. Poverty is often regarded primarily as an economic problem which can be alleviated by sending money. Influenced by three "liberation thinkers" fashionable in the 1960s—Frantz Fanon, Paulo Freer and Ivan Iliac—Sir Fazle recognized that poverty in Bangladeshi villages is also a result of rigid social stratification. In these circumstances, "community development" will help the rich more than the poor; to change the poverty, you have to change the society.That view might have pointed Sir Fazle towards left-wing politics. Instead, the revolutionary impetus was channeled through BRAC into development. Women became the institution’s focus because they are bottom of the heap and most in need of help: 70% of the children in BRAC schools are girls. Microfinance encourages the poor to save but, unlike the Graeme Bank, BRAC also lends a lot to small companies. Tiny loans may improve the lot of an individual or family but are usually invested in traditional village enterprises, like owning a cow. Sir Fazle’s aim of social change requires not growth (in the sense of more of the same) but development (meaning new and different activities). Only businesses create jobs and new forms of productive enterprise.After 30 years in Bangladesh, BRAC has more or less perfected its way of doing things and is spreading its wings round the developing world. It is already the biggest NGO in Afghanistan, Tanzania and Uganda, overtaking British charities which have been in the latter countries for decades. Coming from a poor country—and a Muslim one, to boot—means it is less likely to be resented or called condescending. Its costs are lower, too. it does not buy large white SUVs or employ large white men.Its expansion overseas may, however, present BRAC with a new problem. Robert Kaplan, an American writer, says that NGOs fill the void between thousands of villages and a remote, often broken, government. BRAC does this triumphantly in Bangladesh—but it is a Bangladeshi organisation. Whether it can do the same elsewhere remains to be seen. It can be inferred from the passage that().
A. Fazle Hasan joined a left-wing political party.
B. the Grameen Bank used to lend money to small firms.
C. many girls in Bangladesh are deprived of education.
D. women in Bangladesh are more hard-working than men.