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Marguerite Duras

Obama concede poder nuclear ao Irã

"There was a fairly unanimously negative response to Ben, which is interesting to me, because it indicates that I’m out of touch with what most people find sympathetic, or how much people need to feel a kinship with a character to follow along with a story. It was surprising how vehemently people disliked him. It illuminated some sort of social phenomenon where readers singled him out as the loathsome character in the work. I feel like every main character in the story makes some pretty selfish choices and is inconsiderate of others. It seems like just because Ben might be more outwardly prickly, he gets the harshest reprimand. Whereas everyone thinks Alice is the "likable" character, when it’s implied that she physically assaulted someone and got kicked out of school for that. With Miko, it’s ‘oh, she’s so beautiful and likable and she was the victim,’ but she was making some very bad ethical choices and was being deceptive about it… whether it’s done courteously or not, she is definitely proactive about making herself happy… and I think it really says something about human nature, in that social skills and good looks really go a long ways towards compensating for bad choices". (A.T.)