Word: novelizations
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...service is internet slang for what happens when, for better or for worse, an artist gives the people exactly what they want. Philip Pullman's brief, exquisite novel ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE NORTH (Knopf; 104 pages) is fan service at its best. North is set in the same quasi-Victorian alternative universe as Pullman's Golden Compass, where every human is accompanied by a talking-animal soul mate called a daemon. It's a prequel, the story of how a young and not-yet-grizzled Lee Scoresby, gunslinging aeronaut extraordinaire, and his rabbit daemon, Hester, first...
...story of the Phaliso brothers may sound like one of the dozens of daily crime reports in South Africa's newspapers, but they're fictional characters in Richard Kunzmann's latest novel, Dead-End Road, one of a score of new South African novels focused on crime. Just as violent crime remains a hot topic of headlines and social conversation, so has it become the hot literary genre in a society plagued by a daily surfeit of true-life horror stories...
...Other writers have tackled everything from vigilatism and muti killings (where a victim is killed for body parts to be used in witchcraft) to abalone smuggling and the murder of street children. In Nicol's latest novel, Payback, the protagonists are former gun-runners from the liberation struggle days. The new crime fiction captures the frustrations, fears and also optimism of a changing society, offering readers highly complex characters on both sides of the law. In South Africa, so long cast in black and white, capturing the shades of gray is the new challenge...
...many readers as far-fetched, if not downright silly. They also prevent a simple enjoyment of the book - its pleasant pastoral passages are sooner or later interrupted by jarring expositions that wouldn't look out of place in a 19th century manual of eugenics. Here's one from the novel's main character, Chen Zhen...
...book will find a mainstream Western audience, and believes that foreigners may even "be able to understand the point I am trying to make about freedom and independence better than many Chinese." Perhaps his faith in Western civilization - he names Jack London's White Fang as his favorite novel - is a vehement reaction to everything that modern China has done to him. Jiang says that one of the reasons he went to Mongolia in 1967 was because its remoteness would allow him to bring along banned "bourgeois" literature, impossible to possess almost anywhere else in China at the time. "Freedom...