Word: novelizes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...with a series of careful character sketches, a rapidly moving plot, and detailed scene descriptions that Donoso's novel moves, sometimes tortorously and awkwardly, as if trying to imitate the horrific lives of the people it portrays. Within Curfew's chapters of machine guns and blood, moreover, Donoso's novel proves that even in an area where police stand on every street corner and seem planted for protection, it is unclear who is the object of their guard. In Donoso's Chile nothing is sacred, no one is safe, and even love perishes in the face of political complications...
...climax of the novel occurs at the actual funeral of Matilde Neruda. Thousands of communists, Leftists and friends converge on the local cemetery to protest and to show respect for the dead, including the perennial drunkard Juan Lopez, or Lopito, as he is known to his friends including Vera and Torre. Angered by a policeman's laughter at his incredibly ugly and clumsy daughter, Lopito picks a fight with the machine gun man and is put in jail without bail...
Everything important in A Handful of Dust is in the film: Brenda's almost somnambulistic descent into adultery; Tony's puttering obsession with his awful hereditary home; the death of their child, the tragedy that brings them to crisis; Tony's final flight up the Amazon toward the novel's immortal conclusion. James Wilby's Tony is stoically wet, and the subtlety of Kristin Scott Thomas' charmlessness as Brenda is awesome. But the malice, as well as the compressed energy of the novel, is beyond Sturridge and Granger. Waugh moved us to tears; this adaptation invites only respect...
...shopping malls. That propels her into New York City, where Son Jason, a punk-rock musician who lives in a Bronx tenement, and his pregnant girlfriend Flame, nee Sara, add to the imbroglio. But, after all manner of marital peccadilloes, Wolitzer (In the Palomar Arms) spins her fifth novel into a bittersweet tribute as the Flaxes finally celebrate their anniversary. "We waltzed around the perimeters of the living room," Paulie recalls, "the winners in an arduous marathon dance...
...This is the true story," Mary McGarry Morris begins her first novel. "It starts once upon a summer day in Vermont." A half-naked Lorelei picks up a child-man who is working on roads for the county. The simpleton extends "his tarry hand." Immediately the voluptuous girl steals a pale blue pickup truck and waits for him on the soft shoulder of the highway. In a fast page, she has kidnaped a baby girl, and in what seems like five minutes after their first meeting, the three have driven into the Twilight Zone, only one as it might...