Word: inventer
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Amin somehow seems more gigantic, more ridiculous and more murderous than any other real-life figure; if he did not exist, a novelist could scarcely invent him. As it happens, Big Daddy has already inspired what amounts to a budding literary subgenre. In Britain, two small satirical paperbacks by Punch Columnist Alan Coren, The Collected Bulletins of President Idi Amin and its sequel, The Further Bulletins etc., have sold 750,000 copies. Within the past year, at least four fictional thrillers (Target Amin, The Killing of Idi Amin, Excellency and Crossfire) and a play (For the West, by Michael Hastings...
Novelists have been poaching on real life for some time and Truman Capote didn't invent a new genre, but only gave it a name, when he called his reportorial In Cold Blood a "nonfiction novel." Alex Haley called Roots a work of "faction," blending fact and fiction, but the distinction wasn't made all that clear on TV, embarrassing Haley deeply. Far more tricky legally is Robert Coover's new novel about the Rosenbergs, The Public Burning, where real-name living people (including Richard Nixon) are put into wildly improbable situations. If suits occur...
...Mitford sisters did not exist, Evelyn Waugh would have had to invent them. Their splendid improbability makes his ongoing saga of the decline and fall of the English upper class read like an understatement. Take for instance Nancy Mitford, one of the Mad Young Things of the '20s and a bitter-comic novelist in her own right, who ended up in self-imposed exile in Paris, musing about Louis XIV. Or consider the two fascist Mitfords: Diana, who married Sir Oswald Mosley, Führer of the British Blackshirts, and Unity, a prized exotic of Hitler's inner...
...invent East-West spy thrillers in West Germany. Since the end of World War II, the country has provided the setting for real-life cases that match anything written by John Le Carré. Early last year Bonn's counter-intelligence service cast a fresh dragnet into the depths of West Germany's espionage underworld; as a result, 81 key East German agents and numerous smaller fry have been caught...
...country. Con Ed's softspoken, Wisconsin-bred chairman, Charles Luce, 60, himself says that the big firm also provides ''a tremendous catharsis for the pent-up tensions of the city. If we didn't have a Con Ed, we'd have to invent...