Word: novels
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Obscure fact often mixes with popular fancy, fuzzing up the truth and perpetuating legend. The old story of Thomas Jefferson's rumored love affair with a slave is opened for fresh examination in a new novel, Sally Hemings, by Barbara Chase-Riboud. The late Agatha Christie's brief, unexplained disappearance during her first marriage inspired a fictional explanation in the book and movie Agatha, which intensified speculation about the case and could stretch it out for years to come...
...find everything good in my soul, and try and get a little closer to the image of that remarkable man of genius." Yevtushenko does not want to act again. But he is eager to direct a film, preferably one with the same boyhood-in-Siberia theme as his first novel. He'll probably hold out for points...
...film's Dutch makers do occasionally bring to it a certain intensity, arising from still lively feelings about the wartime behavior of their fellow countrymen. Better yet, the movie is based on an autobiographical novel by Erik Hazelhoff, a Resistance hero now living in Hawaii. Hazelhoff escaped occupied Holland to join the Free Dutch forces operating out of England. He returned on an ill-fated mission to rescue some political leaders and later became an R.A.F. bomber pilot. As played by Rutger Hauer, he is an engagingly unmilitary figure, peering nearsightedly through rimless glasses at a once comfortable world...
...Passion Play, Kosinski's seventh novel, the man's name is Fabian. But in essence he is the bloodless Levanter of Blind Date (1977), the vengeful wanderer Tarden of Cockpit (1975) and the haunted boy in Kosinski's first and best fiction, The Painted Bird. Fabian differs from his predecessors chiefly in occupation: he is a competitive horseman. The aging jockey plays a strange sort of polo - a one-on-one contest in which animal and rider become a single figure jousting on a timeless range. Like many equestrians, Kosinski's rider is graceful on horseback...
This centerfold prose disfigures the novel and makes a few paragraphs indistinguishable from Harold Robbins at the gallop: "When she arrived, the flare of her seductive allure would be in full glow, the meld of her sexuality fired by the challenge of another woman." Fortunately, Kosinski's kinks are a minor portion of Passion Play. The reader who can get past horse-and-lady scenes that bear no relation to International Velvet will be rewarded with passages of great force...