Word: despairs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Director Rainer Werner Fassbinder and screenwriter Tom Stoppard have made an interesting attempt to put Vladimir Nabokov's novel Despair on film. Anyone who has read the book might think that reconceiving the story in cinematic terms would be impossible--the tale relies on the reader's acceptance or disbelief of the first-person narrator's word. But Stoppard's conception is genius; only the delivery falls short of the mark...
...when the Harvard football team meshed as completely as the dreams of the most partisan fan. It was a taste of invincibility for those who have believed all along in the deceptive talent of this squad. It was the 285 seconds that at first evoked hope, then despair as the rest of the game failed to do it justice...
...weight, once and for all, and let his slothful habits fall by the wayside. The description of his decision and the absurd steps he takes are fine, but after he gets all cranked up, he simply and predictably caves in again. These trivial moments of neo-existential despair wear kind of thin. Alter's prose, given to somewhat untailored lushness, merges with the decidedly out-of-the mainstream setting to produce an interesting novel that doesn't always have a whole lot under the surface. But the threadbare spots in his carefully woven story get by on the strength...
...Gertrude Stein and Scott Fitzgerald who christened the period. The hackneyed phrases "lost generation" and "The Jazz Age" still seem very real and important to Americans--the despair and romance of American letters in the '20s and early '30s continues to fascinate. Americans have eagerly poured over biographies of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe and the like. Of the man who went so far toward establishing the reputation of these writers, however, little was known save scraps of stories and legends. Now, Scott Berg's biography goes far toward illuminating the life of Maxwell Perkins, an editor for Scribner...
Home is a comfortable estate briskly run by his Scottish stepmother and filled with attentive servants. Caged in darkness, the young master writhes between despair and bitterness, thinking that the best those around him can do involves simply "nursing him back to a state of health sufficient for him to be left to their all-en-folding embrace of fatuity...