Word: waif
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Haunted by his mother's madness, Louis (Mario Gonzales) has the ephemeral charm of a wide-eyed waif. A twilight dance on the lawn with Sylvie (Nicole Jamet) reveals the mad, musical magic within him. It is a lyrical moment of which Serreau and her cast should be proud...
...stands there in her dust-jacket photograph, a tiny woman of 95 Ibs., with the figure of a spare 14-year-old. She stares out with the enormous, haunted eyes of a Keane waif, of a wounded bird, menaced and fragile. Readers who have grown over the years to admire the superb moody intelligence of Joan Didion's prose have first had to learn that this alarming vulnerability is an affectation and a part of her strategy as a writer. Despite all the fits of weeping and the killer migraines and the California dreads that blow across her novels...
...stoic silence. Bertolucci's observations are no less sentimental, but at least he took some artistic risks in the process. While Olmi seems to feel that the sheer homeliness of his technique amounts to blunt honesty, his aesthetic is every bit as disingenuous as that of a professional waif portraitist in Montmartre. All he has done is serve his picturesque peasants on a pretty platter so that rich people, from a safe distance, can get their fill...
...starting place is Paris and the German armies are on the move to complete their Occupation. The odd couple who dominate the action are soldiers of ill fortune. The plight of S.L. Jacobowsky (Joel Grey) is dire; he is a Polish refugee Jew. He is also a Chaplinesque waif with the resilient ingenuity to trip up brute force. Colonel Tadeusz Boleslav Stjerbinsky (Ron Holgate) is a towering Polish nobleman full of caste prejudices. He has the voice of an opera star, and a conviction that war and patriotism are twin badges of honor...
...America, fiction is always in trouble. The novel has been receiving extreme unction for 20 years, the short story is the waif of literature, perennially searching for a home. Yet this fall, scores of worthy novels have issued from distinguished publishers; stories still find a loyal readership. Random House Editorial Director Jason Epstein notes that James Michener's novel Chesapeake is selling twice as well as his last one. A first novel, Final Payments by Mary Gordon, has sold 40,000 copies. Says Epstein: The outlook for U.S. fiction has "never been better...