Word: petaling
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...music these days, but you have to hand it to them: they're still our filthiest medium, God bless 'em. You can get away with things on paper that you could never sing about or show onscreen. Michel Faber's colossal, kaleidoscopic new novel, The Crimson Petal and the White (Harcourt, 838 pages), tells the story of a prostitute in Victorian England, and if it's ever filmed, it'll be rated around an NC-45. But it also hints that reading and sex have a lot in common: both are a uniquely intimate exchange of secrets and pleasures...
...wait for the movie. Read The Crimson Petal and the White now, while it's still a living, laughing, sweating, coruscating mass of gorgeous words. Don't be put off by the setting--London, 1874--or the length, or that unfortunate, overlong stuffed shirt of a title. Don't worry about its author's ominously French-sounding name (Faber is actually a Scot by way of Holland and Australia). Ever since last fall readers have been watching for another knockdown, breakout book on the order of Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections. It's here...
...pulls out all the stops for "The Crimson Petal and the White" by Michael Faber (Harcourt; September), giving it a starred, boxed review. "Faber's bawdy, brilliant second novel tells an intricate tale of love and ambition and paints a new portrait of Victorian England and its citizens in prose crackling with insight and bravado. Using the wealthy Rackham clan as a focal point for his sprawling, gorgeous epic, Faber, like Dickens or Hardy, explores an era's secrets and social hypocrisy...A marvelous story of erotic love, sin, familial conflicts and class prejudice, this is a deeply entertaining masterwork...
Korean director Jang Sun Woo has never been one to shy away from sex and violence?or worry about what the censors might think. In Petal, he restaged the 1980 Kwangju massacre, when Korean soldiers killed or wounded thousands of protesters. His 1994 To You From Me shocked audiences with its explicit sexual themes?and the main character's obsession with her own derriere. Last year he had Korea's censors in conniptions with Lies, an S&M whipfest that begins with a kinky sculptor deflowering a schoolgirl. Lies was in-your-face auteur cinema at its rawest?the censors...
...fresh, the music is new to Burns, who, he has said, knew almost nothing about jazz until an offhand remark by a baseball player being interviewed for his previous series set him to thinking and got him listening. The rest of us can hear Ellington play The Single Petal of a Rose or Parker lay into Cherokee and be stirred by mute wonder. Burns doesn't have to go the mute route. He gets to extend and explore all those feelings, amplify them and put them all onto what may be the longest documentary PBS, or any other network...