Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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HADRIAN VII. Alec McCowen exhibits an outstanding command of technique as Frederick William Rolfe in this deft dramatization of Rolfe's novel of wish fulfillment, Hadrian the Seventh...
INVITATION TO A BEHEADING. As a play Russell McGrath's adaptation of the Vladimir Nabokov novel is less than successful, but Ming Cho Lee's set is elegant, Gerald Freedman's direction is deft, and the acting is high-styled and full of flair...
Rabbits, we are told, have mercifully been provided with short memories because they are so constantly prey to the threat of being killed. They would go mad with fear and despair if they could remember the past. Men seldom realize it, Kurt Vonnegut suggests in his latest novel, but they have more in common with rabbits than they like to think. Except that men forget on purpose, and are a prey to one another...
...matter of this small, strangely schizophrenic novel literally becomes the colonel's own sentences, his semifictional forays into his own Aussie boyhood during the '20s and '30s. Gingerly he launches into an account of life with his upper-class Sydney family: a barrister father, a tennis-playing mother, "unforgettable-character" grandparents, a funny, Christian Science-spouting sister. The result is a tender exercise in memory quite touching in its own right. Even the Chinese interrogator soaks it all up with pleasure. Then he uses it in a hyperbolic scene that involves hypnotizing the colonel and forcing...
Brainwashing, especially in the wake of the Pueblo experience, remains a timely subject. And Braddon's theme-that the personality with the surest sense of itself is most likely to survive-is persuasive enough. But in much the same way, the novel that best succeeds is the novel that best knows itself. Unfortunately, the author has tried to set what is essentially a muted memoir in a superstructure of futuristic wartime drama. Braddon's you-are-what-you-remember message would have had more power if presented with less literary artifice...