Word: melodrama
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...night, when we were watching a wretched melodrama on the TV above the bar in the Hotel New Hampshire, my mother said, "I don't want to see the end of this. I like
Last week another deadly melodrama was taking place in Warsaw. The central figure was Mohammed Daoud Mohammed Auda, 44, also known as Abu Daoud, who has been accused of participating in two of Black September's most famous operations: the Olympic attack and, in 1973, the murder of two U.S. diplomats in Khartoum. Abu Daoud was sitting at a table in the second-floor cafe of Warsaw's Victoria Inter-Continental Hotel last week when a young man suddenly appeared and hit him with five pistol shots. Abu Daoud was seriously wounded; the assailant escaped...
...sense of monstrousness that arises from her work seems to have its source in an unbridgeable gap between the highly rational and ordered intelligence of the writer, and the chaos and hysteria of nearly everything she writes about. Thus, perhaps, her chronic melodrama, her pumping of more emotion into situations than they have been built to withstand...
This is the movie version, and it cleaves as tenaciously to the facts as any star biopic from Hollywood's heady days. Fassbinder built his reputation with films (The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, The Marriage of Maria Braun) that played high-voltage melodrama as deadpan farce; here he has turned Lale's tale into what Hanna Schygulla, who impersonates her in the film, calls "a Nazi fairy tale." As the new star gorges on her celebrity, making love to her mirror image in a palatial white bedroom, her countrymen starve...
...similar range of contradictory, deeply human strengths and weaknesses. The Sugar House and Beyond the Glass, covering a disastrous marriage and an emotional breakdown (which White also suffered), are less effective, but reflect the accuracy and honesty of the author's eye. White's weakness is for melodrama. A little of this occurs in her first novel, well covered by the hard accuracy of the setting and the characters. The conflict between father and daughter almost saves The Lost Traveller. The later books, which introduce cardboard men, are too high-flown. But in Frost in May, White wrote...