Word: novels
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...writer/director Michael Hoffman's adaptation of Jay Parini's historical novel, Leo Tolstoy is played in grizzly glory by Christopher Plummer. Helen Mirren portrays the mercurial Mrs. Tolstoy, Countess Sofya, who fears her husband - and their fortunes - will be carried out on the shoulders of sycophants. The pairing of these two giants explains why the film, which doesn't open nationwide until February, is making a brief Academy-qualifying appearance in theaters...
...Savage Detectives,” Chilean author Roberto Bolaño’s greatest novel, is a kaleidoscopic fictional autobiography—a treatise on youth, love, literature and death—whose frame is the journal of the Mexican poet Juan García Madero. Madero is the disciple, devotee and faithful hanger-on of two older poets, Arturo Belano (Bolaño’s alter ego throughout his fiction) and Ulises Lima, who follows the pair through the Sonora Desert in flight from a violent pimp and his henchmen. The intervening chapters of the novel?...
...Savage Detectives” gives us hope for this dream, then “2666,” Bolaño’s posthumously-published final novel, released in 2004 in his native Spanish and translated into English last year, is the violent and inevitable calamity that finally shakes us all awake. Written as he slowly succumbed to a failing liver before his death in 2003, “2666” is a work of sheer enigma, the cryptic suturing of staggering indifference and nonrelational pain. Bolaño manages to etch the host of themes that characterize...
...Knight, an American convert, who first articulated a vision for a Muslim punk scene in 2002, when he wrote a novel about it called The Taqwacores. (The title combines the words taqwa, Arabic for "higher consciousness," and core, from hardcore.) He then received an e-mail from a 16-year-old Texan Muslim, Kourosh Poursalehi, who was in a band called Vote Hezbollah, asking how he could get in touch with the mohawked Sufis, skater punks, burqa-wearing riot grrrls and skinhead Shi'ites in the book. When Knight told him it was fiction, Poursalehi responded, "Well, then...
...Knight, punk's rebellious ethos echoes the rebellious spirit of Islam, which, when it began in 7th century Arabia, directly challenged everything from the Meccan economic power structures of the day to the prevailing tribal views on women. Knight's novel opens with a poem, which Poursalehi set to music and which has become an anthem of sorts for the scene: "Muhammed was a punk rocker/ You know he tore s___ up/ Muhammed was a punk rocker/ Rancid sticker on his pickup truck." For Knight, now a graduate student in Islamic studies at Harvard University, the richness and elasticity...