Word: frayn
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...meretricious easy-access audiovisual crud. In fact, a strain of cerebral artiness is suddenly proliferating in the mainstream, a funny autodeconstruction that in the past decade has moved from European literature (Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler), to West End theater (Michael Frayn's Noises Off), to quality American pop: it is at the core of The Larry Sanders Show on HBO, MTV's Beavis and Butt-head and the new Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle, Last Action Hero. Such a fin-de-siecle moment: Schwarzenegger, the son of an Austrian Nazi, starring in a $70 million...
...narrative style Frayn employs occasionally takes the form of a kind of muted stream of consciousness, and when it does, it tends to sound like a bored, dull Joyce. However, the consciousness of a proper English civil servant yields more amusement than might be expected, sometimes by virtue of his very perspective...
...Michael Frayn...
...reader finishes A Landing on the Sun feeling almost sucker-punched, albeit gently. The story allows Jessel to see their achievement of happiness, but the reader ultimately realizes the impossibility of happiness in Jessel's own life. The light touch of Frayn's clever humor makes Jessel's tragedy more poignant...
...Frayn gives a whimsical edge to Jessel's serious outlook--and succeeds winningly at a type of comedy that seems particular to the British. But what is important and moving in A Landing on the Sun, and what most likely won it Britain's most valuable fiction prize, the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award, is its profound sense of prosaic tragedy. The laughing stops abruptly at the end of A Landing on the Sun, and in this breathless transition Michael Frayn succeeds magnificently...