Word: mothers
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...principal diversion from the plot of Mann's novel occurs in the movie's unsatisfactory conclusion. Mann intended to write another novel about the further adventures of Krull, but he did give his novel an hilarious and epiphanal conclusion with Felix's seduction of the mother of one of his lady friends. The film does include this appealing scene, but induces too much complexity into the ending, as well as an implausible love into the hero...
...railroad car remained unopened while the children wept, sickened, and gradually lost control of their natural functions. Tanguy kept up his courage by believing that it was all a "mistake," and that once the authorities found out that he was not Jewish they would send him back to his mother. The word "mistake" recurs through Del Castillo's book and picks up the same rhetorical power and irony that the words "honourable men" do in Mark Antony's funeral oration, rising at last to an almost cosmic indictment of a universe in which such monstrous "mistakes" can happen...
Orphanage by Dickens. Peace brought no peace to Tanguy. He went back to Spain, but found no trace of his mother. He was sent to an orphans' and delinquents' home that might have been imagined by Dickens. It was run by sadistically inclined lay brothers. Tanguy took his beatings without a whimper: he "had exhausted his capacity for crying, just as he had drained away his reservoir of hope...
What Now? At 19 Tanguy still cherished the image of a kind of prodigal son's return. But when he finally found his father in Paris, the boy was coldly rebuffed. Tanguy's mother, who also turned up in Paris, had equally little use for him. She was still a left-winger, lost in the intellectual Minotaur's cave of the '30s. At novel's end, with a wistful touch of Chaplinesque pathos, the 25-year-old Del Castillo, currently living in Paris, asks, "What is to become of Tanguy now?" and offers the shadow...
...eventually destroys him. At 45, Michael Parish is a member of all the right New York clubs, a trustee of his Grotonesque prep school, and in line for the presidency of a Wall Street bank. He has always tried to measure up to the principles he learned at his mother's knee -live on the right side of the park, and never attend matinees. But a series of rude intrusions disrupt his neat, parklike existence. First, it turns out that his wife likes the wrong kind of matinee: one afternoon Michael peeks into her bedroom and sees her with...