Word: novelistic
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...over his diary to the police. Indeed, his neighbors and friends confirm he was good at resolving problems on a chessboard, a talent to boast about of in chess-mad Russia. But he turned into bloodsport what a Nabokov character saw as an existential revelation. In The Defense the novelist wrote of one chess-obsessed character's epiphany: "...he had seen something unbearably awesome, the full horror of the abysmal depths of chess. He glanced at the chessboard and his brain wilted from hitherto unprecedented weariness. But the chessmen were pitiless, they held and absorbed him. There was horror...
...sumptuous Mata Hari melodrama that measures out its many luxurious over a 2-1/2hr. running time, Lust, Caution (from a short story by the late novelist and screenwriter Eileen Chang) is in a way the perfect blending of Ang Lee's two most popular films, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Brokeback Mountain. Like the first, it returns the Taiwanese native to China for a tale of political intrigue; like the second, it locates the passion, melancholy and power struggles of two complicated people. In a new book that includes the movie's original story, script and comments...
Those who have been following the prolific novelist's inspired fictions in recent years, from My Other Life to Blinding Light, know that they are usually fired by sexual tension and hunger, which speak for the ways our secret lives turn on our regular lives until they seem the realest lives of all. In India, inevitably, this dance of mutual need grows ever more serpentine as pleasure-seeking Westerner and improvident local circle one another. Beautiful young men teach foreign guests the "scorpion pose" in yoga pavilions, and then the "crocodile posture" and the "corpse pose." Americans diligently pave...
...deficient as entertainment or art. That cued a righteous backlash of assembled directors (including Italy's Roberto Rossellini) and critics (including Richard Roud of Britain's National Film Theatre), who signed a petition "to express their admiration for the maker of this film." The Cannes Jury, headed by novelist Georges Simenon, sided with the petitioners, giving the film second prize "for a new movie language and the beauty of its images." Informed world opinion followed soon enough. In a 1962 poll by Sight & Sound magazine, international critics rated L'Avventura the second greatest film of all time, behind Citizen Kane...
...That's particularly true of Anne Hathaway, playing Jane. She is extraordinarily attractive, which the historical Jane was not, and does lot of scribbling. But Hathaway never makes us think the woman could write anything more complex than a diet book. The real novelist must have been, even at the tender age she is supposed to be in this film, a much more ferocious creature, determined to make her way as a writer, certain that love - and it is said that she had other, perhaps more meaningful flirtations than this one - must prove a distraction from writing...