Word: novels
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Sartre's novel Nausea, the main character Roquentin is unable to finish his biography of a historical figure. Roquentin ultimately ends up questioning his own life as well as the life of his subject. Sartre's philosophy deals with the problem of viewing another life and one's own very differently, and whether any life can be expressed as it was really lived. Roquentin wishes for the type of meaning in his own life that one can bestow on another's life after the death of that person, where everything in that person's life can be viewed as following...
...pedestrian as book-buyers' motivations may seem, the recent proliferation of biographies shows that biographers today are indeed playing with the conception of biography as a genre. In Sarte's novel, Roquentin's struggles with this problem led him to abandon his biography. Those who persevere and finish a biography have made many choices along the way that are vital in determining what sort of biography will emerge. These questions can be divided into two categories: how the author obtains and interprets the sources concerning the subject, and exactly how the subject is defined...
Adapted from a Graham Greene novel, the film certainly has an enviable pedigree; Greene's works have been made into outstanding movies, most notably the 1949 classic The Third Man. But with Affair, many of the problems can be traced back to the source material. Few contest Greene's virtuosity as a prose stylist, but there's a reason you probably haven't read The End of the Affair. It's a sour, neurotic little novel, and in many ways uniquely ill-suited to film adaptation...
...other hand, was in rehab because I hadn't yet really achieved any kind of life. My nascent marriage was showing signs of miscarrying. A contracted novel I had completed was about to be rejected. During the writing of that doomed book, I had taken to ingesting prolific amounts of narcotics. I didn't take these drugs--Vicodin, Percocet, Dilaudid, morphine sulfate, Talwin, Darvon, codeine, the occasional balloon of street heroin--to help me write; I took them to make me feel better about how badly I was writing...
Adapting the most confounding of Jane Austen's works, Rozema has conflated the author and her creation, Fanny Price (Frances O'Connor). The Fanny of the novel, a mousy poor relative come to live in the eponymous great house, is here, like the author, a witty observer of the swells at romantic play. She's also the patient, strong-willed mistress of her own romantic destiny who finally achieves her long-desired true love. The movie may not entirely please Austen purists, but it is well acted, and it achieves a strong, smart, engaging life...