Word: novelled
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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AUGUST 1914 by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $50 hardback, $19.95 paper). This novel first appeared in English 17 years ago. Since then the 1970 Nobel laureate has added some 300 pages to his fictional but heavily researched saga of Russia's catastrophic involvement in World...
Wine, women and song, not necessarily in that order, keep the pages turning in Oscar Hijuelos' second novel. All are enjoyed by a Cuban musician named Cesar Castillo who immigrates to New York City after World War II and has a few good years in the 1950s as leader of the Mambo Kings. The band's biggest hit was Beautiful Maria of My Soul, which was first recorded in 45 r.p.m. and rose to No. 8 on the "easy listening" charts in 1955. Close but no cigar is the story of Castillo's career, the highlight of which occurred when...
Hijuelos returns the courtesy by giving Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball guest spots in his novel, as celebrities who descend like deities for a potluck supper in the modest home of ordinary mortals. Arnaz turns out to be a sweetheart who eats second helpings, drinks heartily and sings Babalu long into the evening. Ball has good manners and a considerate way of peeking at her watch...
...promise before he is 30; war years in which he serves as a member of a dashing documentary-film unit, enabling him to meet all the right people from Cairo to London and to see just enough action to lend authenticity to The Young Lions, the epic war novel that made him famous; a middle passage in which he fritters away critical and popular esteem while pursuing the good life in Paris, the Riviera and, above all, Klosters, the Swiss ski resort that ^ he and the beautiful, occasionally talented people he drew to him made famous. The ending even produces...
...which he will also direct, about a love affair between an FBI agent and the daughter of a man he hounded to death; "a Victorian rock musical about Oscar Wilde"; and a semiadventure set in Tibet. For the stage, he and Glass hope to adapt Andre Malraux's novel of revolutionary China in the 1920s, Man's Fate, and Hwang is also writing what he opaquely terms a "multicultural farce...