Word: macbeth
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...Just one more time, I promise." This dialogue, familiar from a quillion melodramas, is always uttered by the sap about to step into the old dark house, the line of fire or the unforgiving sea. The Perfect Storm has more whispers of impending doom than all the witches in Macbeth...
...supposed to, that the characters in his plays exist only while they are on the stage or the page. The rest, as far as they and we are concerned, is silence. Thus the eminent scholars and critics who once busied themselves in disputations about the number of Lady Macbeth's children or Hamlet's course of study at Wittenberg were actually engaged in nothing more than romantic woolgathering. But the urge to think of Shakespeare's people as real dies hard, and woolgathering has its charms, as John Updike wittily demonstrates anew in Gertrude and Claudius (Knopf; 212 pages...
...becoming tranquillity. He looks as if he's just stepped in from Harvard Yard, wrapped in a forest green corduroy jacket with an open-necked plaid shirt tucked underneath. When he speaks, his voice has the delicate cadence of a professor singing out the most violent passages of Macbeth with a studied calm. He has, it seems, left his globe-striding, Gulfstream-riding, options-exercising CEO persona somewhere on the other side of this megadeal. The only flaw in this picture, frankly, is a fist-size interactive pager that is dancing between Levin's palm and his pocket. The pager...
...trip to Auschwitz itself was an abomination, and what followed was worse. But we have this fantasy that confronted with really, truly evil things, that there should be some kind of evil character waiting in the wings, responsible for these acts of malefaction-an Iago, or a Lady Macbeth, or a Richard III. And the surprise is, Fred just seems pathetic, self-deceived, ordinary. Is he truly monstrous, is he hiding something? Does he know full well what he's doing? Or is he a kind of self-deceived, vain, in many ways self-satisfied, moral fool...
...Stoppard of absurdist drama, but in The Idiots Karamazov he outdoes himself. Insert famous femme fatale Anas Nin, lover to the likes of Henry Miller, Gore Vidal and Salvador Dal, a few scenes from Eugene O'Neil's Long Day's Journey into Night, and references to everything from Macbeth to Robert Anderson's Tea and Sympathy, and you have one of the most delightful literary travesties this side of Rozencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead...