Word: kugelmass
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...torch for the novel's heroine, soon to be 130. Peru's Vargas Llosa belongs to a long line of Emma Bovary's professional admirers. Gustave Flaubert's scandalous character has vamped the imaginations and intellects of writers from Baudelaire to Woody Allen, whose l971 short story The Kugelmass Episode conjures a contemporary character who can transport himself to Yonville to play a role in Madame Bovary. "The mark of a classic," wrote Allen, "is that you can reread it a thousand times and always find something...
...headlines are more absurd than the products of imagination. Richler's contemporary entries offer hilarious refutation. Excerpts from Stanley Elkin's The Dick Gibson Show and Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint belong on the shelf with Rabelais and Swift. Woody Allen's The Kugelmass Episode stands as a classic. In it, a professor of humanities is propelled backward in time to the arms of Madame Bovary and the pages of a remedial Spanish textbook: "He was running for his life over a barren, rocky terrain as the word tener ('to have...
Stories plainly marked "Made in preoccupied New York" include Leonard Michaels' Robinson Crusoe Liebowitz, a frenetic piece of scatology turning on the inaccessibility of a toilet; Renata Adler's Brownstone, tartly amusing observations from a Manhattan building; and Woody Allen's brilliantly executed The Kugelmass Episode. In search of a love affair, an unhappily married humanities professor from City College hooks up with a magician with the power to transport people into the novel of their choice. Professor Kugelmass chooses Madame Bovary and makes repeated visits to Yonville for trysts with Emma. The miracle has side effects...
...beautiful, Kugelmass thought. What a contrast with the troglodyte who shared his bed! He felt a sudden impulse to take this vision into his arms and tell her she was the kind of woman he had dreamed of all his life...
...other hand, some stories are better than others, like the uproarious "Kugelmass Episode;" or "The Shallowest Man in the World," which is unusual in its focus and its restrained tone. But either way, Allen is superb. The final paragraph of "Retribution" best expresses this tortured man trapped in his own body...