Word: fictions
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...development of series characters in fiction is almost always a triumph of commerce over art. No matter how interesting a character is, there is usually one right story about him or her, and a good writer finds it the first time. Shakespeare got just one play each out of Hamlet and Macbeth, and it is hard to imagine what remained for a sequel -- or prequel...
Part of what makes any fiction fun is the inversion of expectations. Kramer, the ruling white, is the team's iconoclast, full of scorn for procedure and authority. He is expedient, intemperate, womanizing and often drunk. Zondi, the oppressed black who for reasons of race earns a modest fraction of his partner's pay, is a convent-educated conformist. By the chronological end of the series he is a dutiful husband, attentive father and slightly stodgy bourgeois citizen. Each is responding to his social position: white Kramer can afford the luxury of defiance, but black Zondi cannot...
...Provence and left his native England without delay or regret. He did the things a lot of dreamers do: he bought language tapes, a 200-year-old house, a Citroen deux chevaux, and resolved to write a novel. But the renovation of ancient stone and the crafting of new fiction do not mix; each day workmen banished Mayle to a succession of chalky corners. So what could he do with his time except make his fortune -- by chronicling the scene around him in irresistible prose...
Though the fiction of a singularly influential and enlightened French "Arab policy" was exploded in the gulf, the result has been a more realistic, selective outreach across the Mediterranean. Mitterrand and Foreign Minister Roland Dumas are now concentrating attention on their Maghreb neighbors. In many French eyes, the North African lands that were once colonial possessions are a time bomb. Arab immigrants have for the most part rejected assimilation, and in future years may become a heavier challenge to the concept of what it means to be French. Surprisingly, residents of foreign origin constitute no greater a share...
...that American officials may have hatched in the Middle East over the past decade. Last week, as yet more charges came to light, there was no shortage of fingerprints, plot twists or stool pigeons. But there was a desperate shortage of certainty, perhaps because when truth is stranger than fiction, the two are harder to separate...