Perhaps the most classic example of Soviet Impfic is The Joke (1967), a novel that announces its ambitions in its title, which might also have been intended as a type of preemptive defense. Soviet Impfic, a genre predicated on subversion of appropriate speech, was necessarily published underground, in books that circulated in samizdat if not merely in manuscript between the drawers, illegalized, seized, banned, and often destroyed along with their creators. The greater the consequences of speaking up, the greater the power of speech, which is why Impfic’s true heyday was the Soviet twentieth century, when it comprised much of the best literature of dissidence. If Impfic, like all fiction, must be judged on its aesthetics, its aesthetics must be judged as inextricable from its politics. It’s telling that Impfics from recent American literature are set at colleges and universities, especially in their humanities departments, the primary precincts for speech-policing in this country. Two great Impfics come to mind from my own tradition: Saul Bellow’s “Him with His Foot in His Mouth” (1982), in which a single insult spontaneously delivered by a male professor to a female colleague echoes through their subsequent careers, and Philip Roth’s The Human Stain (2000), in which a Black professor passing as Jewish makes a quip about absent students that’s racially construed and unravels his existence. In other words, Imp Fic, or, in a word, Impfic, occurs when a guy (yes, typically a guy, used to speaking and being listened to) says something he doesn’t have to and perhaps really shouldn’t and proceeds to suffer the consequences-often through his remark being, by his own account, misinterpreted, even willfully misinterpreted. This genre I just made up out of the perverse inversion of Poe’s poetics includes fiction whose plot is set in motion by an outburst-usually a remark attributed to one of its characters or delivered by its narrator within quotations. Poe’s imp puts a stop to his tale, but the impetus (sorry again) to speak against all reason-contra all common sense and advisement-is what starts so many examples of what I’m going to call, because I can’t help myself, Imp Fiction. In the century after Poe’s story, the phrase “the imp of the perverse” came to mean the urge to do exactly the wrong thing at the wrong time, the impulse (sorry) to self-sabotage and self-destruction. He develops the need to tell someone about it-to tell anyone or everyone-and, driven by this need, finds himself dashing to the cops to make a full confession. That’s what I have to say about the noble Heidi.In Poe’s “The Imp of the Perverse” (1845), a man pulls off a perfect crime-to be precise, he pulls off a perfect murder, which he considers so masterful that it can’t go unreported. Heidi helps Clara to get of her wheelchair. She gets back to the mountains, and Clara comes to visit. Far in the story, Heidi goes to family with a child named Clara. Heidi moves to her Grandfather’s house on the mountain tops. The story is about a little girl named Heidi. Heidi is a marvelous book and will probably be delighting children for centuries. I suggest that if you have an emerging reader, buy chapter books or book some from a library so he/she can get interested in reading, give he/she a prize for every 40 or 100 chapter books so when your child is ready, let your child read some and if he/she struggles to read, give some help. I get a prize for every hundred chapter books I read. My mom has been counting them ever since covid started. So far in coronavirus, I’ve read 605 chapter books for real. I read the book that has 285 pages, but not the one that has 336 pages. The book I had has about 285 pages exactly. If your child is an very good reader, l suggest that you let him/her try it and then tell you what they think about Heidi. If your child is an reading beginner, I suggest that you read it to him/her.
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