Word: novelization
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Ally McBeal character were not enough, America is discovering another, the heroine of an enormously hyped novel called Bridget Jones's Diary, by British author Helen Fielding. The book, a best seller in England for months, is a sometimes funny but ultimately monotonous chronicle of a year in the life of an unmarried thirtysomething London editor whose thoughts never veer far from dating, the cocktail hour and her invariably failed attempts at calorie cutting. A typical Bridget reflection: "Cannot face thought of going to work. Only thing that makes it tolerable is thought of seeing Daniel again, but even this...
...heart of both books is a deep appreciation of individual liberty, a strong disdain for convention and a young man's infatuation with an interested older woman. Vargas Llosa forged his talent in such rebellious passions. In 1962, Peruvian authorities burned hundreds of copies of his politically explosive first novel, The City and the Dogs. The literary firebrand was also known for his precocious love life...
...narrator grows older and more pieces of the familial puzzle fall into place, the novel starts to slowly simmer. The vignettes, always sharp and memorable even when their point is nor readily apparent, become increasingly lucid as the mystery unravels. Cavalcades of transient images fill three or four pages at a time and then vanish, but their aftereffects are less ephemeral. The constant aggregation of detail that comes with passing years explains exactly the boy's gradual understanding of his tortured familial history...
Although the novel certainly does center on the travails of the narrator's family, in no way does that limit the interest of Deane's far-flung vignettes. Within the framework of the controlling mystery, Deane comments on everything from Catholic School to the violence plaguing Northern Ireland to this day. One of his most disturbing but beautiful scenes occurs when the narrator watches the men of the neighborhood set bonfires to burn rats out of defunct air raid shelters. Imagine the wonders he can work when satirizing a sadistically strict math teacher or when describing the ghost...
...published critic and poet, is no stranger to writing, Reading in the Dark is his first venture into fictional territory. The boundary between poetry and fiction, especially for Deane, with that glowing prose, is not as stringent as that between the two Irelands; with any luck, this novel will not be his last...