Word: fictions
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Pavilions, a six-hour, three-part mini-series on HBO is a sumptuous package tour of 19th century India under the British Raj. The lush, romantic travelogue leisurely wanders the flowery landscape of Victorian fiction, where swashbuckling heroes die happily for Mother England, wasp-waisted ladies in corsets palpitate at the prospect of illicit love, fawning natives in turbans plot palace intrigue, and florid, harrumphing senior officers shoulder the white man's burden. The production, based on M.M. Kaye's 1978 bestseller, represents pay cable's first real venture in "long-form" television. Filmed on location...
Such is the problem confronting Lauren Adler, a savvy first-semester freshman from New Jersey and the heroine of Victoria Silver's latest addition to the genre of Harvard fiction. Before one fateful Wednesday in November, the most serious question that plagues Lauren during her Russian Revolution seminar is which of its 11 students is the most attractive. But then Russel Bernard, the star of both the seminar and Lauren's personal musings, is murdered and his body thrown into the Charles, in a manner that bizarrely recalls the murder of Rasputin discussed in her last seminar meeting...
When the royal hunt of Mme. de Maintenon was turned into a piece of popular fiction in The King's Way (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; 497 pages; $15.95), it reigned for 80 weeks on France's bestseller list. Françoise Chandernagor, 38, a French judge, has been more fortunate than most first novelists in the wealth of sources available for her imaginative reconstruction. She has drawn from the writings of two of France's great literary stylists and keenest chroniclers of the age, Mme. de Sévigné and the Due de Saint-Simon, as well...
Still, demographic accuracy remains a modest virtue in fiction. Giardina possesses greater gifts, notably in creating children who sound and act like children, and in compressing plot into homespun metaphor. Henna prepares a dinner of spaghetti topped with broccoli and garlic; the widow's son bursts out, "This is not what we eat." When Henna gazes at the woman he believes he loves, he thinks, "You are like an open book, always open to the wrong pages, revealing information no one is prepared for." Occasions like these easily give a glum and sometimes predictable story the air of authenticity...
WHITE'S MATURE WORK, in essays or in fiction, dealt very much with the real world; White championed environmental concerns long before they were socially acceptable. He refuted Anne Morrow Lindbergh's The Wave of the Future, which he thought disguised the real evil of fascism. He opposed hydrogen-bomb testing and McCarthyism; he was capable of finding, in the deceits of American advertising, "a family resemblance" to the propagandas of the German Nazis. And in Charlotte's Web White offered...