Word: novelized
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
France's Alain Robbe-Grillet believes in the cult of impersonality. The "new novel," with which he made large literary waves during the '50s, said goodbye to psychology and presented people and their actions as reflected in surface appearances and objective happenings. In 1961 he wrote the haunting, memorable Last Year at Marienbad, a movie in which it was marvelously impossible to tell who (if anyone) was doing what (if anything) to whom, let alone...
...other James Baldwin is the questing novelist, the private man loaded down with personal problems that he must defeat-or be defeated by. This is the Baldwin who with his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, marvelously evoked a Harlem boyhood nurtured in a storefront church. It is the Baldwin who, with post-Gide candor, courageously rendered the homosexual experience in his second novel, Giovanni's Room. But this is also the writer who six years ago turned out the deeply disappointing novel, Another Country, a lengthy excursion into the world of bisexuality...
Self-Editing. A lesser and looser work than The Master and Margarita, it reports slyly the absurd difficulties of a young writer resembling Bulgakov. Maxudov, the hero, is a staff member for a journal called the Shipping Gazette, and he writes a novel for the same reason that prisoners make their ropes out of bedsheets. He reads it to his literary friends. Awful, they say. He steals a revolver and determines to edit himself. As he is gluing his nerve together, the editor of a magazine bursts in and offers to serialize the novel (which is called Black Snow...
...important repertory group, the In dependent Theater, decides to produce Maxudov's novel as a play. All goes well until the great director Ivan Vasilievich-an obvious takeoff on Stanislavsky-gets hold of the script. He is an autocratic dramacide whose ears reject all utterances not made by himself. He has a few suggestions for Maxudov's play: the hero must be stabbed, not shot; the sister must be rewritten as a mother, and so on. Maxudov refuses to make the changes and sadly returns to the Shipping Gazette...
Disastrous Production. It is all wonderfully funny, but did any of it actually happen? Well, Bulgakov in the early 1920s did work for the magazine of the Railwaymen's Union and did write a novel (The White Guard), the beginning of which was serialized in the last two issues of a dying literary journal. And Stanislavsky's Moscow Art Theater did stage a version of the novel in 1926. But the play, retitled The Days of the Turbins, was a success...