Word: fiction
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...author of four other novels, Yu has earned his reputation as a literary brute, whose characters constantly suffer at the claws of icy fate. He openly admires Faulkner's novels, and the grotesque absurdities in Yu's fiction wouldn't feel out of place in Faulkner's degenerate American South: a teen tries to rape a woman in her 70s to see what it's like, a man tries to pawn his dead father's frozen body, a drunkard drowns in a cesspit...
Conversely, foreign fiction - especially topical, realistic novels - sells well in France. Such story-driven Anglo-Saxon authors as William Boyd, John le Carré and Ian McEwan are over-represented on French best-seller lists, while Americans such as Paul Auster and Douglas Kennedy are considered adopted sons. "This is a place where literature is still taken seriously," says Kennedy, whose The Woman in the Fifth was a recent best seller in French translation. "But if you look at American fiction, it deals with the American condition, one way or another. French novelists produce interesting stuff, but what they...
Jean-Paul Sartre, the giant of postwar French letters, wrote in 1946 to thank the U.S. for Hemingway, Faulkner and other writers who were then influencing French fiction - but whom Americans were starting to take for granted. "We shall give back to you these techniques which you have lent us," he promised. "We shall return them digested, intellectualized, less effective, and less brutal - consciously adapted to French taste. Because of this incessant exchange, which makes nations rediscover in other nations what they have invented first and then rejected, perhaps you will rediscover in these new [French] books the eternal youth...
...what they seem. Readers (and viewers) don't love books (and movies) like The Kite Runner in spite of these clichés but because of them. The fierce tidying up of ancient grievances allows us to believe that there may be justice in the world--at least in fiction...
Forster (Monster's Ball, Stranger Than Fiction) has ingested this elixir deeply. He's not out to make a spare, understated art film; he knows that the novel owes more to Hollywood than to Iranian cinema. So he pushes each scene, each character to extremes. Viewers will either be swept away ennobled or feel manipulated, even as they wipe away tears. The emotions may be forced, but that doesn't mean the movie...