Word: novelized
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...Museum” is old hat. Lost loves and newspaper columnists, tea houses and Turkish-brand sodas recur in all his books, and the emphasis on B-movies and the world of cinema in particular strongly echoes the more metaphysical treatment afforded them in his novel “The New Life.” These themes could easily grow as worn as the belongings of Füsun’s that Kemal so often caresses...
It’s fitting, then, that this novel so sensitive to the memory of past works finds substance in a tale of objects illuminated by the memories they evoke. “Museum of Innocence” may lack the tight construction of predecessors like “My Name Is Red,” but Kemal’s frustrated recollections resonate more intimately than anything Pamuk has written before...
...what if Prospero is a deceiver? A usurper? A false sovereign, like Macbeth? Philip Roth’s latest novel, “The Humbling,” suggests the synthesis of these two roles in the book’s protagonist: the aging, once-great stage actor Simon Axler. “He’d lost his magic. The impulse was spent. He’d never failed in the theater, everything he had done had been strong and successful, and then the terrible thing had happened: he couldn’t act,” it begins...
These days, Roth is about as prolific as he is grim. His most recent novels have all dealt in almost expository detail with the subject of death and its inextricability from the spectrum of human experience. “The Humbling,” with its three-act structure and its otherwise bare narrative that alternates predominantly between dialogue with Axler and his inner-monologue, could essentially serve as an allegory for Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy. The entirety of the novel, from Axler’s time...
...season, full of certainty and a sense of singularity, and leading to every unforeseeable contingency.” For Axler, this consummate performance, this total surrender of the self in the acknowledgement of the world’s pervasive spectacle, is an act of transcendence. Within the novel, however, it reads more simply; as desperate, as derivative, as meaningless. This is the book Roth has delivered: the rules don’t just prevent you from winning; they prevent you from even playing...