Word: fictional
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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This all-the-world's-a-stage approach to affairs of state comes at a rather delicate time. We have just been assaulted not only by a cascade of Washington-power books but also by their movie and television adaptations. Fiction and truth seem to blend. Robert Chartrand, the Library of Congress's top information-systems scientist, says that even in his orderly mind, dedicated to quick retrieval of facts, there is difficulty sorting out what is real...
...film is a work of fiction, rather than the documentary it might have been, and it creaks to beat the band. Writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala tells three stories about Roseland habitues without revealing a valid emotion. The first anecdote, which resembles an episode from TV's old Twilight Zone series, concerns a widow (Teresa Wright) so obsessed with her past that she and the audience see a vision of her youthful self every time she gazes in a mirror...
...recent years Fast has freed himself from the reins of historical fiction to produce three collections of short stories that libraries catalogue as "fantasy and science fiction," although Fast calls the most recent, Time and the Riddle, "my Zen stories." In these books he cuts loose and plays with absurdities. One tale relates how an American general in Vietnam, "Old Hell and Hardtack Mackenzie," accidentally shoots down an angel while blasting Viet Cong with his machine gun. Another tells of a hole that appears in the floor of a fourth-story apartment in Los Ahgeles, and how a sunlit pasture...
Fast's mellowing is even reflected in his historical fiction. His last novel before The Immigrants was The Hessian, which he cites as his best. It is not a story of heroes and fighters at all, but the tale of how a Hessian mercenary in the Revolutionary War, a mere boy, is tracked down, captured, tried and hung. It is a story of pointlessness and tragedy. The boy who dies is no menace; he is simply pathetic. The people who execute him are not shapers of history; they are its victims...
Claire's Knee. The fifth of Eric Rohmer's "Six Moral Tales" is a sort of bagatelle within a book within a film. It's a wierd sort of whymsical fiction about a diplomat on vacation who becomes hopelessly pre-occupied with the knee of a seventeen year old girl who could care less about him -- all of which Rohmer presents as a story coming to life in the mind of a real-life author who keeps considering and rearranging the events as he writes. Rohmer handles this narrative complexity light-heatedly enough to make it fun rather than pretentious...