Word: underworld
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Farrar, Straus & Giroux will publish in June, is a masterly example of the Russian mode of skaz, or first-person narrative in the vernacular rather than in literary language. Aleshkovsky, who tells his manic tale in the voice of the crook, displays a phenomenal command of police, prison and underworld slang, as well as Russian obscenity. The writer is currently at work on a novel about a Soviet exile in the U.S. Its hero is a small-time Soviet Casanova who ceaselessly roams the country in a rented car in search of love and lust. He finds both with...
...have removed it for noncompliance with housing codes, unaware of its significance. Yet, I reject this as unlikely; it was legally hung on poster clay which remains in place, and few janitors would so boldly invade a private doorway. Nor was it a likely candidate for unft. (Who has underworld connections in a $10 mezuza market?) Such a motive seems andesesvedly optimistic...
...years later, when British Journalist Peter Watson set out to find the painting, Italian authorities had long since written it off. The Caravaggio Conspiracy is Watson's enthralling account of that search, which led him perilously deep into the byways of the international art underworld. Among the astonishing facts he uncovered is that most art thefts are pulled off with as little difficulty as the Caravaggio caper in Palermo. In Italy alone, 44,000 works of art disappear each year. Indeed, during Watson's dogged investigation, enough masterpieces were purloined from churches, galleries and private homes to furnish...
...underworld rose to the bait. First shady dealers, then smugglers and fences and, finally, the thieves themselves came forward to offer him hot merchandise, including pictures purportedly by Tintoretto, Renoir, Van Gogh and Modigliani. Watson had difficulty in authenticating these works as stolen art, with good reason. Most were forgeries...
Through this underworld Pacino stalks like a panther. He carries memories of earlier performances (the bantam bombast of Dog Day Afternoon, the nervous belt tugging from American Buffalo, the crook'd arm from his Broadway Richard III), but creates his freshest character in years. There is a poetry to his psychosis that makes Tony a figure of rank awe, and the rhythm of that poetry is Pacino's. Most of the large cast is fine; Michelle Pfeiffer is better. The cool, druggy Wasp woman who does not fit into Tony's world, Pfeiffer's Elvira...