Word: novel
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...movie, adapted from a Pamela Berger novel, chronicles a monk's visit to a small, provincial French village, where he has been sent to conduct an Inquisition. In the course of his quest to root out heresy, the monk, who is the son of a nobleman, confronts his own past and encounters the mystical, healing presence of a woman who lives in the forest and treats the villagers with leaves and herbs...
Pamela Berger's novel, and the screenplay which she co-wrote with first-time director Suzanne Schiffman, is primarily the tale of women--women as healers, as mothers, as workers, as the backbone of their community. These women, the lifegivers, are contrasted with the rigid authority of the Church. They represent the naturalistic opposite of "civilization" and they challenge the monk's--and the viewer's--nations of what constitutes knowledge, progress, society...
...first, Carver's plain style sounds a lot like Hemingway in his short stories. (Carver has written poetry but has never written a novel.) There's a similar use of ellipsis. "A Small, Good Thing" has the seductively simple ring of Hemingway titles like "The End of Something" and "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place." And the men in Where I'm Calling From hunt, fish, drink and brawl. But although Hemingway's men adopt a tough exterior in order to hide when life or women get them down, Carver's men remain vulnerable, as husbands or fathers, and risk compassion...
SPENCE + LILA by Bobbie Ann Mason (Harper & Row; $12.95). The author of Shiloh and Other Stories offers a lean novel about a Kentucky farmer and his ailing wife, a love story so pure and enduring that it might have been carved with a jackknife on an old tree...
...quality of life, yearns to have. Latin America offers an undistressed leisure, a crowded kitchen table, even a full sorrow. Such is the urgency of America's need that it reaches right past a fledgling, homegrown Hispanic-American culture for the darker bottle of Mexican beer, for the denser novel of a Latin American master...