Word: novels
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...same question on her Louvre walkabouts: "Is this where the curator was murdered?" The curator in question, Jacques Saunière, is a fictional character in Dan Brown's ubiquitous best seller The Da Vinci Code, but her clients' interest was real and surprisingly keen. Some of the novel's "hard-core followers," McBreen remembers, came to the Louvre equipped with highlighted passages and well-researched questions. McBreen sensed a business opportunity for her tour company, Paris Muse. In February, she started to offer Cracking the Da Vinci Code tours: 2 1/2 hour sessions exploring the numerous (and sometimes misleading...
...nation remains largely unknown beyond its own shores. Han Ong would appear to be in a good position to fill the post of bard. The native Filipino immigrated to the U.S. when he was 16, achieved success there as a playwright and won a MacArthur "genius" fellowship. His first novel, Fixer Chao, was about a Filipino male prostitute in New York City who poses as a feng-shui expert to fleece the rich...
...second novel, Ong comes home. The Disinherited is a morality tale set in Manila in 2000, moving throughout Philippine society, from ?lite private sports clubs to pestilential slums. Roger Caracera is the youngest son of a sugar magnate, who has come of age in California and now lives in New York City, where he teaches writing at Columbia University. The novel begins as he returns to the Philippines to bury his estranged father: in a scene straight out of a Victorian potboiler, the will is read in the posh attorney's offices, and Caracera learns that his father has bequeathed...
...world is both flamboyant and bizarre, as his native country can often seem, but there are several off-kilter moments, strange observational lapses that flaw the fictional universe. The novel's first paragraph sets the scene for Caracera's father's funeral: "It was not a good day for a funeral procession. Temperature: ninety-two at one p.m. and expected to rise to a hundred and ten before day's end." This steep a rise in the course of an afternoon is all but impossible, as anyone with a passing familiarity with the region's weather knows; anyway, it never...
There's no guesswork in Art Spiegelman's graphic novel In the Shadow of No Towers (Pantheon; 38 pages), but there isn't much education either. Spiegelman is also a Pulitzer winner, as it happens, for Maus, a bleakly beautiful comic about the Holocaust. In the Shadow of No Towers--the title is a bad poem in one line--is Spiegelman's very personal take on the destruction of the World Trade Center in 10 monumental (14 1/2in. by 19 1/2in.), full-color episodes. The attacks left Spiegelman in a traumatized, neurasthenic state. (MISSING, proclaims a poster, A. SPIEGELMAN...