Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Bride Wore Black, Truffaut has Gallicized a novel by American Mystery Writer Cornell Woolrich and remade it in his own images. As revealed in a series of shuffled flashbacks, the groom and the bride (Jeanne Moreau) trip happily down the steps of a church and smile at the wedding party's photographer. A shot rings out, and the new husband falls. Five men are responsible for the killing, a group of drinking and hunting cronies who played with a gun until one of them accidentally became the trigger man. The thought of revenge becomes an idée fixe...
Tormented Transit. Typically, it all started with notes that Lowry, an inveterate journal keeper, took during a trip to Mexico in late 1945 and early 1946. "By God, we have a novel here!" Lowry cried on first rereading them. Editor Day more accurately describes Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid as "a notebook on its way to becoming a novel." Yet this fragmented, compulsively self-centered, brilliant half book does not at all misrepresent its author. For Lowry was less a novelist than, in Day's words, "a diarist, compulsive notetaker, poet manqué, alcoholic, philosophizing...
...written on every page, beginning with an astonishing, tumbling opening sentence of 198 words (". . . the moving shadow of the plane below them, the eternal moving cross . . ."). At first, Wilderness seems like a man going to be buried rather than resurrected. The news catches up with him that his latest novel, The Valley of the Shadow of Death (Lowry's original title for Under the Volcano), has been turned down by his British publisher. After that disappointment, he takes to full-scale drinking, surrounded by an unending hangover and cantina jukeboxes blaring I'm Dreaming of a White Christinas...
...Juan Fernando Martinez, fellow drinker and philosopher, who mirrors like some doomed twin the life-death forces at war in Wilderness. The ending is both pat and heartfelt. When Wilderness discovers that Juan Fernando had died six years before, he is redeemed into a kind of rebirth, and the novel fades on wheat fields ripening...
...Primrose remarks. Yet that is exactly what Lowry has written, with desperate passion, despite the fact that he considered it "rather a second-rate ambition to be an optimist." Lowry could no more round off his hope than his book. But at a time when the fashion for the novel is basic black-when despair has gone slick-Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid once again gives the struggle between good and evil the dignity of an even match, and the excitement of a metaphysical cliffhanger...