Word: novelled
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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VALMONT. Maybe it's time to call it a day for film remakes of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos' novel of sexual gamesmanship among 18th century French aristocrats. Director Milos Forman and screenwriter Jean- Claude Carriere have not so much adapted this deliciously nasty tale as they have embalmed...
...PEOPLE AND UNCOLLECTED STORIES by Bernard Malamud (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $18.95). This posthumous volume includes an unfinished novel and 16 short stories never before collected in book form. The novel is little more than a sketch of what might have been, but the stories -- grim and comical in equal measure -- offer poignant reminders of Malamud's gift and his stature as an American master...
Almost alone among his contemporaries, Malamud was equally gifted at the novel and short story. In some moods he preferred the short form: "In a few pages a good story portrays the complexity of a life while producing the surprise and effect of knowledge -- not a bad payoff." All the stories salvaged here are good, and so is the payoff...
...Unhappily denied such attentions, The People is a rough draft of the novel it might have become. The year is 1870, and Yozip Bloom, a Russian immigrant and itinerant Jewish peddler, roams the Pacific Northwest. He is kidnaped by an Indian tribe that calls itself the People. For reasons not entirely clear, Yozip has been singled out as the spokesman, Yiddish-inflected English and all, who will defend the rights of the People against the perfidious, treaty- breaking whites...
...best part of this volume can be found in the 16 stories following the unfinished novel. Five have never been published, and the rest were never collected in hard covers. It is difficult to imagine why not. Malamud hit his stride early, writing stories of old men trying to preserve their dignity amid the shambles of harsh circumstances. In The Literary Life of Laban Goldman, an elderly Jew attends night school to improve his English and get away from his nagging wife; he experiences a brief moment of triumph when the Brooklyn Eagle publishes his letter to the editor urging...