Word: novelness
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...White Nights” sees his life flash before his eyes as he tastes a spicy hors d’oeuvre. This moment appears to be directly inspired by Proust’s episode of the madeleine—in fact, André Aciman’s entire second novel reads like an exercise in bringing a feverish Proustian narrative to twenty-first century Manhattan. This novel, which blurs the boundaries between supermarket romance and literary fiction, mainly relies on Aciman’s ease at spinning together long, hypnotic sentences to fuel the heavily psychological and minimally plot-driven...
...Clara and analyses her every gesture. Though laden with the narrator’s passionate obsession for Clara, “Eight White Nights” chronicles an essentially chaste love. Aciman denies the reader the full range of the sensuous prose that he unquestionably mastered in his first novel, “Call Me By Your Name,” and consequently creates a more emotionally tentative work...
...Lost Books of the Odyssey,” Zachary Mason’s mesmerizing new novel, takes Odysseus’s homeward bound journey and riddles it with uncertainty. Ithaca could be the hero’s home or it could be an illusion. Odysseus himself may be the author of his own story; his heroic deeds could be merely his own invention. There’s no one end, no one story. Mason’s tale doesn’t just wander—it writhes...
Also like Calvino, Mason prefers puzzles to set truths. For that reason, his novel goes beyond a simple adaptation of a classic text. In his essay “Why Read the Classics?” Calvino once wrote, “A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much a sense of discovery as the first reading.” Mason’s reimagining takes such discovery to heart. He himself may be aware of the similarities between his and the Italian author’s work. Many of his plot twists recall Calvino?...
First was the diluting effect of second-degree adaptation. The franchise first manifested as “MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors,” published by Richard Hooker in 1968. Two years later, Robert Altman’s tremendously well-received film version premiered. Two more years later, and TV’s “M*A*S*H” was born. When I think of a show-based-on-a-movie-based-on-a-book, I don’t imagine a cultural icon...