Word: novella
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...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...
...last novella, "The Condominium," is about a man who is very much like the condominium he lives in. Marshal Preminger lives in a complex of towers that "only sell to the right sort." In the same manner, he is cut off from himself: "Secretly, he was niggered, PR'd, chinkified." His apartment is "an investment to protect," just as his answer to the classic question, "To be or not to be, you schmuck," is that "if you pay and pay, eventually they must give you something for your money." Preminger is finally overcome by his 37-year-old virginity...
Alcoholism landed Lowry in the Skid Row ward at New York's Bellevue Hospital, a searing experience that became the subject of his novella Lunar Caustic. He was also jailed and deported from Mexico, the scene of Under the Volcano, a novel that took ten years, at least four revisions, and the love, patience and help of Lowry's second wife, Margerie Bonner, a former Hollywood actress. Given Day's cool, unenthusiastic and quite accurate assessment of Lowry's poetry and stories, it comes as something of a surprise to find him pulling...