Word: novels
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Adulteress (Hakim; Times Film) sounds as if it might be pornographic. It is based on Emile Zola's early novel, Thérèse Raquin, a somber slice of life that was called pornographic as soon as it came out. Neither book nor movie is. Written with Naturalist Zola's unfailing passion for the sordid underside of reality, the book showed how illicit love led to murder, how murder turned love to hate, how hate led to plots of new murders, and how a couple of suicides ended the whole bloody business. The movie plucks the story...
...faction of the Femina jury (named for its sanguine literary tastes and bloody infighting), a novelist, playwright and onetime actress known only as Simone (real name: Pauline Benda). "Several years ago," according to an acquaintance, "she stationed her age at a permanent 75." She reads a novel a day, still manages to take a personal interest in handsome young writers. Madame Simone is haughtily and heartily despised by the "Blue" faction (named for the hue of its blood), led by a scientist, mathematician and relative youngster, the Duchesse de la Rochefoucauld, 62. An oldtime suffragette and notorious pincher of sous...
Thackeray delighted in debunking his own art. In his novel Philip, he wrote: "When I think how this very line, this very word, which I am writing represents money, I am lost in a respectful astonishment...I am paid sixpence per line. With [these last 67 words] I can buy a loaf, a piece of butter, a jug of milk, a modicum of tea-actually enough to make breakfast for the family." Such digressions helped to conceal the sweat and effort that Thackeray put into his work. "I can see him pointing now with his finger," wrote his daughter Anny...
Crime does pay, especially when-as in this novel-it is 1) skillfully packaged as fiction, 2) taken by the Book-of-the-Month Club, 3) sold to the movies before publication, and 4) optioned by a Broadway producer. The payoff in this case goes to John D. Voelker, 54, a justice of the Michigan Supreme Court. Using the pseudonym of Robert Traver, he writes out of 23 years' experience as a trial lawyer and county prosecutor in Ishpeming (pop. 9,400), a mining center set amid the rocks, swamps and forests of Michigan's Upper Peninsula...
...Barr. Now professor of humanities at Rutgers, he has taught at his alma mater, the University of Virginia, pioneered (with Hutchins and Adler) the Great Books idea, served as president of Great Books-oriented St. John's College in Maryland. At 60, "Winkie" Barr has committed a first novel. Not surprisingly, it is about life among professors, and even less surprisingly, it says that U.S. professors, students, college presidents and trustees are a sorry...