Word: boredoms
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Meetings because the hero - the narrator's saintly brother - is named Lev, an unusual choice which I accept as an homage a moi.) I reached Amis by phone in Philadelphia, where his book tour has taken him. We chatted about House of Meetings, the ego of the novelist, the boredom of good characters, and why the English hate writers...
...There is this paradox that terror is always a concession of impotence and insecurity and illegitimacy, and Stalin's rule had that. And with terror comes boredom, in the oddest way. Mohamed Atta brought boredom to us too. It's not just airport queues, with some humorless airport official frisking your 6-year-old daughter. It's the confrontation with the dependent mind. There's no argument possible. We share no points of discourse. It's like being with any fanatical Christian, for instance. The higher faculties just close down, because there's nothing for them to do. So there...
...parking-lot attendants, make their living stealing gas from cars. Natasha has slept with two of the three and now runs an international Internet mail-order bride service called Amour Transit, patronized by the fsb (former kgb) and foreign-intelligence services. It's an empty existence of anger and boredom punctuated only by what's on television that night. "Those who created the dumbest of the comic books," says the nameless sniper, "created our present." One day, the friends are watching the World Cup on TV together, and when the mediocre Russian side inevitably loses, they blame not the players...
...mayhem-ridden novels including Sharky's Machine and Primal Fear; in Atlanta. A decorated World War II veteran, he got a job as an obituary writer at the Atlanta Constitution after the war, then became a reporter and freelance photographer. His move into fiction was inspired in part by boredom--he began writing Sharky's Machine, his first novel, at age 50, while serving as a juror. His fast-paced thrillers translated easily to film--Burt Reynolds played the title character in the 1981 adaptation of Sharky's Machine, and Edward Norton earned an Oscar nomination for playing the cunning...
Soderbergh doesn't miss a trick, and for a while it's fun for us to share in his fun. But there comes a moment when his Euro-noir film turns into another sort of exercise for the audience: an exercise in boredom. We begin to see that Soderbergh is counting on style to distract us from the familiarity, not to say banality, of the narrative that Paul Attanasio has winnowed out of novelist Joseph Kanon's rather good thriller. What we have here are two standard noir characters. There's the hard-shelled antihero, Jake Geismer (George Clooney), returning...