Word: novelness
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...writer/director Michael Hoffman's adaptation of Jay Parini's historical novel, Leo Tolstoy is played in grizzly glory by Christopher Plummer. Helen Mirren portrays the mercurial Mrs. Tolstoy, Countess Sofya, who fears her husband - and their fortunes - will be carried out on the shoulders of sycophants. The pairing of these two giants explains why the film, which doesn't open nationwide until February, is making a brief Academy-qualifying appearance in theaters...
...Savage Detectives,” Chilean author Roberto Bolaño’s greatest novel, is a kaleidoscopic fictional autobiography—a treatise on youth, love, literature and death—whose frame is the journal of the Mexican poet Juan García Madero. Madero is the disciple, devotee and faithful hanger-on of two older poets, Arturo Belano (Bolaño’s alter ego throughout his fiction) and Ulises Lima, who follows the pair through the Sonora Desert in flight from a violent pimp and his henchmen. The intervening chapters of the novel?...
...Savage Detectives” gives us hope for this dream, then “2666,” Bolaño’s posthumously-published final novel, released in 2004 in his native Spanish and translated into English last year, is the violent and inevitable calamity that finally shakes us all awake. Written as he slowly succumbed to a failing liver before his death in 2003, “2666” is a work of sheer enigma, the cryptic suturing of staggering indifference and nonrelational pain. Bolaño manages to etch the host of themes that characterize...
...covers over the reality of his stories with surrealistic affect, but “2666” abandons all traces of that affect for an unflinching, procedural language that bypasses poetic imagery or strips it to its disturbing core. The Part About the Crimes, the longest section of the novel and its most infamous, unfolds 300 pages of stark summary, illustrating the various cases of kidnapping and murder that took place in and around Santa Teresa between 1993 and 1997. The narrative, based on the actual unsolved murders in Juárez known as the feminicidos that continue to this...
...Knight, punk's rebellious ethos echoes the rebellious spirit of Islam, which, when it began in 7th century Arabia, directly challenged everything from the Meccan economic power structures of the day to the prevailing tribal views on women. Knight's novel opens with a poem, which Poursalehi set to music and which has become an anthem of sorts for the scene: "Muhammed was a punk rocker/ You know he tore s___ up/ Muhammed was a punk rocker/ Rancid sticker on his pickup truck." For Knight, now a graduate student in Islamic studies at Harvard University, the richness and elasticity...