Word: novella
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Great Gatsby. Mia Farrow plays the role with all of its attendant splendour and graceful, but inevitably brutish, carelessness. Farrow maintains a delicate balance between a gay childishness with her illicit lover, Gatsby, and a wanton callousness, a total disregard for anybody's feelings. Henry James's novella, Daisy Miller, adapted for the screen by Peter Bogdanovich, is a portrait of exactly that kind of woman. But Cybill Shepherd's performance is slightly more questionable. In fact, the whole movie is questionable, like one of James's long spiralling sentences, full of commas, semicolons, and dashes--seemingly interminable. Bogdanovich...
...they violate expected sex roles: "A man may know every one, men are welcome to that privilege." The implication is that Daisy may certainly not know everyone, and Bogdanovich sets out to exploit the underlying sexual currents of this statement. One of the mysterious qualities of James's novella is the question of Winterbourne's motives. At the very beginning there are intimations of an illicit relationship between him and another woman never seen in the book. Then the narrative returns to the story at hand and we are led into Winterbourne's mind only enough to tantalize...
...Bandello's novella, Juliet was 18 years old. In Brooke's poem, which was Shakespeare's immediate source, she became 16. The playwright, however, for reasons never convincingly argued, makes Juliet a couple weeks short of her fourteenth birthday, and underlines her age several times. Romeo is some years older, but still an immature teenager...
...young priest's confrontation with the monastery's father abbot (Trevor Howard) is the heart of the drama, trenchantly adapted by Brian Moore from his own 1972 novella. Moore's point seems to be not so much the changes in the church as the problems they pose for the individual conscience. Abbot Tomas, his face all crags and valleys and wind-worn heaths, carries the weight of the story's dark irony. He has nurtured the old ways, it turns out, to protect the faith of simple people - but it is a faith in which...
...REALLY FAIR to be too cynical about Eastern religion: whatever it is, it's at least a complex bundle of ideas not simply grasped by Westerners or novices. It's a bit easier to raise eyebrows at Hermann Hesse's novella Siddhartha, but still, Hesse--who also wrote Journey to the East, seems to know something about Hindu mysticism, or at least to approach his subject with a certain degree of intellectual honesty and sophistication...