Word: novels
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...When Humbert Humbert sadly apostrophized his absent inamorata by crying, "Oh my Lolita, I have only words to play with!", he was selling words short. Vladimir Nabokov, the verboleptic who dreamed up Humbert, surely knew this, as do his readers: Lolita is the wordplay lover's favorite novel. Numbers have their power; they can be squared, cubed, extended to infinity. But they can't match the universe of ideas and feelings that come into being when letters collide. Words create worlds...
...every seesaw is balance. For me, that means Harry Potter, no, a feature documentary on the Beatles in India, yes. My latest film is based on The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri's novel of migration and displacement, which is itself a seesaw between two great cities, New York and Calcutta. Appropriately the film will premiere simultaneously in both cities in November, with a sophisticated marketing strategy and no horse carriages in sight. For my next film, Gangsta M.D., Hollywood will, for the first time, pay good money to buy rights from Bollywood, transplanting to Harlem the beloved story of a Bombay...
...leading politician, was gunned down by his brother. The doctors admit that the prodigal son's blood is swimming with traces of cocaine, opiates, barbiturates and cannabis, among other substances. It's on the cover of every paper, with one daily dedicating half its front page to a graphic-novel style recreation of the fateful, bacchanalian night of partying...
...electronic carillon, and the old ethic and religious tensions are reasserting themselves. "In many ways," writes Morris, the city has become "a paradigm of our 21st century zeitgeist." A paradigm it will remain, for Hav exists only in the mind of Jan Morris. Last Letters from Hav, her first novel, was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1985. The volume sowed confusion among Morris' fans, many of whom wrote to request directions and ask if a visa were necessary. "Only one single correspondent," she writes in an epilogue to Hav, "an octogenarian lady in Iowa, saw my little book...
IRENE NEMIROVSKY IN 1942 A Ukrainian Jew living in France was deported to Auschwitz, where she was executed. Six decades later, her daughters discovered among the papers she left behind the manuscript of an extraordinary unfinished novel: Suite Francaise. The book consists of two parts (Nemirovsky planned three more), the first following a handful of French families of different social classes through the crashing chaos of the retreat from Paris, the second set in the hushed, simmering hell of a small town under German occupation. It's a work of Proustian scope and delicacy, by turns funny and deeply moving...