Word: novels
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...influence goes both ways. Slumdog, which is based on a novel by Indian diplomat Vikas Swarup, approaches India and Indians with a new sensibility. Slumdog's central trio aren't victims; they're individuals, and they each manage in different ways to rewrite the lives they've been born into. Jamal, in the film, talks a lot about destiny, but his story is really an argument against it. It's a long way from City of Joy, the 1992 film in which Om Puri's noble rickshaw puller shows Patrick Swayze's disillusioned doctor the path to enlightenment. Slumdog recognizes...
Early in Yu Hua's novel Brothers, young Baldy Li sticks his head into a hole in a public toilet and hovers inches above the putrid waste below, all for a glimpse of naked female bottoms on the far side of the partition. For the next 600-plus pages of this satire of modern China, the reader is suspended in similar fashion - curious but teetering dangerously close to the muck...
...gallery has collapsed, so that it now seems just a jagged scar interrupting the smooth transition of history's layers. "It's like you are trying to read a book and some of the pages are missing," says Marquis. "Here we have lost an entire chapter in the archaeological novel...
...riches - more like shining maggots to Oscar gold. The path that led Japan to take its first Oscar in Best Foreign Language film at this week's Academy Awards started with the film's lead actor, Masahiro Motoki, contacting author Shinmon Aoki to quote a passage of his novel Coffinman: The Journal of a Buddhist Mortician in the actor's own travel diary. "Maggots are life, too," the passage, in the voice of the novel's protagonist, reads. "When I thought that, I could see the maggots shining...
...dramatic story of an unemployed cellist who finds work cleaning and preparing the deceased for burial. The film has already grossed more than $34 million in Japan since its September 2008 release. (The film is scheduled for limited released in the U.S. in May.) Sales of Aoki's novel, on which the film is based, have spiked, along with advance sales of the DVD. (See pictures of the top 10 Oscar Dresses...