Word: memoirs
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...current, deservedly-high reputation with The Changing Light at Sandover, a "modern epic" in which Merrill and his lover chat via Ouija board with a plethora of heavenly spirits. For the last few years, Merrill has published almost no poetry: he has, instead, been writing A Different Person, a memoir of his postcollegiate years in postwar Europe. Digressions, meditations and flash-forward passages follow each of the new book's 21 chapters, intended, the poet says, as "reveries suitable for a pillow book, for gossip, for shoptalk...
...confining himself to his time abroad, Merrill has fit this "memoir" into the genre of travel-writing; but so many events, so many towns and visits and illnesses and chance meetings, are crowded into Merrill's 271-page year that the real potential of travel-writing as a form--the chance to see an unusual mind as it reacted to other cultures, towns, works of art--is largely lost...
Laderman's Marilyn, on the other hand, is for grownups. The libretto by Norman Rosten, based on his 1973 memoir Marilyn: An Untold Story, concentrates on Norma Jean's notorious love life, tracing her downward spiral to a drug- induced death in 1962. Soprano Kathryn Gamberoni gives a breakthrough performance as Monroe: after this, companies should be lining up to offer her femmes fatales from Bellini's Norma to Berg's Lulu. The opera, however, is as much of a mess as Marilyn was. Rosten's lines (Marilyn to her half-sister: "How's your little dog Lollie...
...that the press wove a legend." Wove a horror story. A half-century after shooting her last feature, Riefenstahl is still the world's most controversial director; her name summons the conflicts of defiant artistry and compromised morality. Thus the U.S. publication of Leni Riefenstahl: A Memoir (St. Martin's Press; $35) and the U.S. premiere of Ray Muller's documentary The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl (at the New York Film Festival) are vital artistic events...
TELEVISION HBO recounts the history of the AIDS epidemic, gingerly. BOOKS Smilla's Sense of Snow is a riveting thriller set in Denmark and Greenland. Scott Smith's first novel, A Simple Plan, needs work. Willie Morris goes golly-gee in his memoir, New York Days. CINEMA True Romance is true carnage. MUSIC A cheap shot at the underclass mars an appealing new album by Garth Brooks...