Word: dinesen
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Though The Immortal Story is a French production, it, too, boasts an American director, the prodigious Orson Welles, adapting an Isak Dinesen anecdote. The works of the Scandinavian taleteller resemble rows of icicles, gelid, brittle and pure. To bend them is to break them; to lend them warmth is to make them lose their integrity. Even Welles has been unable to fashion more than a laborious, misshapen exercise. The reasons are obvious. This is his first film in color-an inappropriate mode for a fiction written in etched, formal prose, devoid of the sensual palette. Secondly, because the movie...
...relatively little known and appreciated in the U.S. The four novellas in The Puzzleheaded Girl should firmly establish her reputation as a writer who can make the familiar meaningful without gimmickry. It is not without some reason that her work has been compared to that of Nabokov and Isak Dinesen. Her essential theme in The Puzzleheaded Girl is rootlessness. Her characters are continually trying to flee themselves. Europeans come to America only to find that they and their new country are incompatible; Americans go to Europe and dream of coming home. Miss Stead also fences with the discontents and ambiguities...
...pieces, which sold for $1,000 each five to ten years ago, now go for up to $6,000, and several museums have paid more than $45,000 for her huge wall sculptures. Nevelson herself, a big-hatted, cigar-smoking metaphysic on the order of Edith Sitwell or Isak Dinesen, is pleased but not entirely surprised by her acclaim. After all, she explains, "acceptance of art has something to do with a developing visual intelligence and sense of scale. People are used to my things now because of large buildings, large cities...
This is the sort of confection that only writing genius can keep from seeming half baked. Author Dinesen gets away with it, but only just. Here as always, her story creates its own magic in the telling, until she actually manages to convey a feeling that Cazotte, for all his verbal prancing, is a kind of spiritual incubus who poses a real threat to the girl. When, as often happens in Dinesen stories, raw innocence confounds soft corruption, the book induces, as if by some miracle contrary to all logic, an almost palpable sigh of relief...
This is not enough. But it will have to doat least until Isak Dinesen's heirs and publishers get around to that Italian novel...