Word: novelists
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...DIED. JOHN FOWLES, 79, reclusive and experimental novelist; in Lyme Regis, England. Escaping a career in teaching, Fowles became a transatlantic cult success in the mid-'60s with The Collector, a dark novella about obsession, and the 600-page, metaphysical labyrinth of The Magus-experiments in fiction that endure despite being made into forgettable films. His surprise best seller of 1969, The French Lieutenant's Woman, may be best remembered for the windswept pairing of Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons in the 1981 screen adaptation by Harold Pinter...
...DIED. AMRITA PRITAM, 86, novelist and poet who published her first story collection at age 16 and went on to write more than 60 works exploring the suffering of South Asian women and the violent division of the Indian subcontinent following the end of British rule in 1947; in New Delhi. Born to a Sikh family in what is now Pakistan, Pritam fled to India during the country's partition?a brutal period that she described in her most famous poem, Ode to Waris Shah...
...cusp of retirement when he loses a leg in a bicycle accident. Depressed in the prison of his apartment, he falls for his immigrant Croatian nurse. The idyll is interrupted by the arrival on his doorstep of the title character from Coetzee's previous novel, Elizabeth Costello. An aging novelist of dwindling talent (a courageous invention for an aging novelist like Coetzee), she is determined to shake Rayment from his lethargy and have him for herself. She takes over his life, threatening his romance and his sanity. Rayment laments that he "never knows, with the Costello woman, when...
...rooted in the intractable narcissism and brutal selfishness of its protagonists. One laughs during “Squid” not out of delight, but in recognition of human stupidity at its apogee. The worst offender in this respect is household head Bernard Berkman (Jeff Daniels): he is a novelist whose literary reputation is diminishing in inverse proportion to his sense of entitlement and self-worth. For example, when asked by his teenaged son whether or not to bother reading “The Metamorphosis” he replies: “Kafka was one of my predecessors...
...gloves in an impulsive parody of bygone gentlemanly honor. Though primarily comic, this moment reflects the film’s general atmosphere of nostalgia incarnated in Spritz’s father, Robert. Verbinski makes a quiet critique of contemporary culture through the perspective of Robert, a fading Pulitzer-winning novelist. The world he sees as petty, cheap, throwaway, is reflected in Dave Spritz’s chipper weather reports, the fast food thrown at him, and the no-place settings he occupies (malls, hospitals, fancy hotels). When Robert appraises his son’s professional success, saying...