Word: novelizations
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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WITH THE exception of a pretentious author's note at the novel's beginning, the entire novel is written in Mgungu's voice. Janowitz tries to endow it with an ironic wit, but instead it comes across as boring and arrogant...
...reader's sympathy swings against Mgungu early on in the novel. At one point, he describes himself as "A brutal and violently ignorant savage, though charming in a primitive way, who was fleeing his wives and 13 children for the charms of a young American, possibly even the Hamptons and the New York Film Festival if everything went well and I played my cards right." This is meant to be satirical, I suppose, but it's so clumsily executed and so misses its easy targets that one really can't be sure...
...Janowitz some credit, though. She has collected in hardcover perhaps every hackneyed cliche ever made about the idle rich. A literary phenomenon created by the same chic Manhattanites she ineptly tries to parody, Janowitz doesn't seem the least bit aware of the element of self-parody in her novel. But, then again, anyone who could agree to appear in those liquor advertisements with Arthur Schlesinger that run in The New Yorker probably wouldn...
...novel experiments with modes of narration. Vilmure borrows Faulkner's method of narrating through more than one persona, as each brother tells part of the story. The younger brother's narration is skillfully executed, as he relates what a child sees. Vilmure follows the boy's mind processes perceptively and eloquently...
Vilmure emphasizes style in the novel, as he searches for his own voice and identity and looks for a new direction in literature. Although he began writing the book as a college freshman, Vilmure is remarkably adept at conveying the internal and external struggles of life. Life in the Land of the Living equates life with death, depicting the several dimensions of both. The novel is a compelling one, especially for so young an artist...