Word: novelists
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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HOSPITALIZED. Françoise Sagan, 50, French novelist and playwright whose shocking first novel about youthful nihilism and passionless hedonism, Bonjour Tristesse (1954), published when she was 18, became an international best seller; in Paris. While on a visit to 8,500-ft.-high Bogotá, Colombia, she collapsed with pulmonary edema and cardiac weakness brought on by the altitude; she was flown home to France and remains under sedation in improving condition...
...happy book. The dreariness of the '30s and the strains of family life appear to have had a bad effect on Edgar's style. He is either too terse or verbosely academic, as if the boy grew up to be a literary critic rather than a novelist. Evocations of his time and place are frequently bloated with pretentious prose: "In my own consciousness I was not a child. When I was alone, not subject to the demands of the world, I had the opportunity to be the aware sentient being I knew myself to be ... As they slowly built...
...children barely survive in order to write about them with inspired resentment. Loving memoirs tend to rank second only to corporate histories of tool-and-die companies as the kind of book any reader can put down. In the face of this, Wilfrid Sheed, a witty, acerbic critic and novelist (Office Politics, Transatlantic Blues), has managed to compose a mellow family chronicle that turns literary and psychological tradition on its head. This is more than a memoir; it is an occasion...
...novelist John le Carré says that he will never write again about George Smiley. Le Carré cannot think of Smiley anymore without seeing Alec Guinness. The actor stole the author's creation, hijacked it into flesh. One remembers that some primitive peoples feared being photographed because they thought the camera would make off with their souls. Mention George Smiley to anyone who knows Le Carré's spy novels and his memory will instantly throw onto its screen the image of Alec Guinness. Smiley will not be fat and smudgy looking, as the novelist imagined him. He will be simply, immutably...
These artistic enactments are forms of mythmaking. They rearrange experience to endow it with drama and significance. The novelist John Gardner once wrote a version of Beowulf from the monster Grendel's point of view. In Gardner's telling, a blind harper appears at King Hrothgar's hall and sings, transforming Hrothgar's bloody, sordid career into "ringing phrases, magnificent, golden, and all of them, incredibly, lies. The man had changed the world, had torn up the past by its thick, gnarled roots and had transmuted it, and they who knew the truth, remembered...