Word: novels
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...says junior Ashley Prinzi. "When you're bored in class, everything comes back, because this is where it happened." Yet most are learning, however slowly, to move on. Last month a student in Carol Samson's English class was so struck by something she read in the Charles Frazier novel Cold Mountain that she stayed after class to show the passage to Samson. "Your grief hasn't changed a thing," it reads. "All you can choose to do is go on or not." Frank Peterson says he now gives his biology students more in-class assignments so he can work...
...discuss Minghella's adaptation of the Ripley book--how he has deepened it, enriched it, possibly distorted it--we'll be spilling a bean or two about the plot, which is, anyway, well known from the novel (published in 1955 and still in print) and a 1960 French film version, Rene Clement's Purple Noon (which is on video and was rereleased in U.S. theaters in 1996). You're welcome to see the new movie first--it should be on every naughty child's Christmas wish list. Then come back and we'll talk...
Highsmith described The Talented Mr. Ripley as being about "two young men with a certain resemblance--not much--one of whom kills the other and assumes his identity." In the novel, Tom Ripley, an orphan in his mid-20s with a gift for larceny and mimicry, is hired by a rich shipbuilder to go to Mongibello, an Italian resort village where the man's son Dickie Greenleaf (played by Law in the new film) has been idling, to try persuading the lad to return home to the family business. Tom agrees, sails to Europe and, on seeing Dickie, is dazzled...
...sexes, but was alone at the end with her cats and pet snails. Did this adopted doyenne of Europe resent being neglected back home? At her death, in 1995, she had no U.S. publisher for her last work. And though nearly a score of films were made from her novels and short stories, most of them were European. The Talented Mr. Ripley is the first Hollywood-studio production of a Highsmith novel since Strangers on a Train...
Snow Falling On Cedars is essentially a liberal soap opera. Its simple, anti-prejudice message is hidden (in David Guterson's novel) behind dense thickets of rich, writerly prose and a narrative that moves large numbers of characters back and forth in time as it proceeds, in its leisurely way, to solve the murder mystery that serves as its none-too-robust pacemaker. Readers in the millions took the book seriously because Guterson was so serious about it, though it did not hurt that his setting--an island in Puget Sound, before, during and immediately after World...