Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...circumstances of the duel in which Pushkin is killed. The action of the play moves back and forth from Lermontov's own life and his more-or-less conscious attempts at emulating Pushkin to the life of Gregory Pechorin, Lermontov's idealized self and the protagonist of his novel, which bears the same title as the play...
...contrast to Lermontov stand Doctor Werner, his good friend, and Varvara Bekhmetyeva, his mistress, who pass through the novel unchanged. Michael Tratner, as Werner, plays from this vantage point with great skill, creating a physician who is solid and sensible, a man who has his head screwed on the right way. In doing so, he becomes the sorely-needed link between Lermontov's reality and his illusions, a function Lermontov becomes increasingly less able to fulfill himself...
Because, both in the novel and as her self, Ekaterina Sushkova is intellectually overpowered by Madame Bekhmetyeva, there is a natural tendency to underrate the actress portraying her. It is a measure of Michael Curtin's achievement that Ekaterina-Princess Mary tends to embarrass the female members of the audience with her simplicity and naivete. Perhaps in their defensive intellectual self-consciousness they failed to appreciate that her Ekaterina is the only sort of girl a man like Lermontov could "love," precisely because she would never threaten him intellectually...
After the final melodramatic act of John Cheever's new novel-in which a boy barely escapes being turned into a gasoline-soaked torch on the altar of an Episcopal church-the reader is assured that everything is going to be "as wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful as it had been." Lest it be thought that this is an attempt to fill the current American prescription for a tragedy with a pain-killing happy ending, it should be made clear that Cheever means by his four "wonderfuls" very much the same bitter things conveyed in the famous five "nothings...
...with sporting initials and a static style who has in recent years been a flashily successful practitioner of that mournful art. His first book, The Interrogation, a kind of Krapp's First Tape, won France's third most prestigious literary award, the Prix Renaudot. His second novel, The Flood, a further torrent of talent and eloquence put mainly to the purposes of adolescent simpering, was also drowned with praise. But it is doubtful if any amount of critical bolstering will be able to shore up his latest novel, which reads a bit like an endless progressive-rock lyric...