Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...With the last two narrators, the novel spins out of Budnitz's previously firm control. The style changes from short sentences to descriptive passages, while snippets of modern existence attempt to address all the moral and emotional issues Budnitz has introduced. To prevent the rich symbolism of Ilana's account in the old country from laying waste, Budnitz reintroduces the egg as the unifying concept for the novel. When Ilana dies, the egg loses its sheen, and the novel comes to a halting...
...beneath the cushion of a chair before sitting; she counts the knives in the silverware drawer." Through Mara, Budnitz explicates mental illness and the rationality of murder. This is too ambitious for her plot and narrative, especially given Mara's stream-of-consciousness rants. Had the rest of the novel not been so richly descriptive, this technique might have been effective. Instead, each thought staggers, laden with a false sense of importance and significance...
...Like the oval egg, the novel can also resemble a slightly misshapen circle. Budnitz struggles to weave multiple narratives into a unifying whole, but the sense of centripetal completion fails as each new voice grows more allied with the increasingly amorphous world inside Budnitz's novel. Still, Budnitz has more than answered the requirements of techniques that a good novelist ought to engage. Thus, one can only hope that If I Told You Once, will have a twice, for Budnitz has the skills of a tremendous writer, and round two could be a knockout...
...Here's a hip new term for you. It seems that Robertson Davies' 1992 novel The Fifth Business (part of the Deptford Trilogy) is becoming all the rage again--specifically the meaning of that cryptic title. The Fifth Business refers to that all important character in a dramatic form that causes all the action to spiral out of control--without realizing it. Thus, you have the four "businesses"--the protagonist (Clinton), the antagonist (Starr), the love interest (Monica) and the figure presiding over the resolution (Hillary). And then you have the "fifth business"; in the Clinton scandal, it would...
...three writers to make it to the stage, you can bet that it shouldn't have made it there at all. But such ominous artistic omens didn't prevent Producing Director Peter Altman of the Huntington Theatre Company from adapting Nobel-prize winning author Edwin O'Connor's 1956 novel, The Last Hurrah, into a theatrical event. Speckled with scheming politicos, snooty aristocrats and down-to-earth Irish-American folk, O'Connor's novel, a sweeping panorama of '50s Boston political scene, seemed a perfect recipe for dramatic success, right? Wrong...