Word: novelizations
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...calamities that strike Hermann's characters might be outtakes from the Book of Job, but she renders them with an emotional acuity that makes them believable. And though the shifts in perspective that frame the novel may seem gimmicky, the rhythmic quality of the prose never falters. As for the bleak title, it will surprise the reader to find that, for Ruby at least, there is a cure for grief. It is hard won, yes--but, in Hermann's telling, it's worth the winning...
...beginning of Nellie Hermann's novel The Cure for Grief (Scribner; 272 pages), the heroine, Ruby Bronstein, has three brothers and two parents. Ten years later, her family has been effectively halved, its members picked off by illness and death. The question at the heart of this story is simple: How does a girl manage to grow up while fighting the gravitational pull of a Shakespearean succession of tragedies...
Breaking Dawn By Stephenie Meyer; out now After three volumes of slow-motion foreplay, the last novel in the mega-best-selling Twilight series finally tells us everything we always wanted to know about sex (and marriage) with vampires but were terrified to ask. It's a wild but satisfying finish to the ballad of Bella and Edward...
Elegy Directed by Isabel Coixet; rated R; out now Professor has affair with lovely grad student: we've heard that one before. So had Philip Roth, whose novel The Dying Animal is acutely attuned to the dissonance of May-December love. This fine film has a touching performance by Penélope Cruz and a great one by Ben Kingsley. Cue the Oscar buzz...
...Solzhenitsyn published a memoir, Invisible Allies, in which he honors the people who helped him protect his writings from the state. It reads like a spy novel--coded messages, boxes with false bottoms--yet the danger was real. Were it not for these friends, from the fellow zeks (labor-camp inmates) who assisted him to the foreign journalists who smuggled out manuscripts, Gulag might not have seen the light...