Word: cartwright
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...sign of a civilization's slippage is the ease with which it blurs the line between tragedy and farce. Consider Justin Cartwright's Masai Dreaming (Random House; 287 pages; $23), a novel about the making of a Hollywood adventure movie with a Holocaust hook. The satirical possibilities are unnerving. Spectacular East African scenery, colorful colonials and free-range tribesmen, with the Final Solution worked in. How about Mel Gibson and Julia Roberts...
Spiraling gracefully toward that conclusion, Cartwright, a novelist with film experience, often becomes the target of his own satire. At the center of the story is S.O. Letterman, a movie producer who starts off high-minded and ends with his eye on the box office. Letterman does not give a rat's rump for historical truth. Tim Curtiz, a London-based journalist taking a crack at a lucrative script-writing assignment, does. The subject of the movie, called Masai Dreams, is a striking French anthropologist named Claudia Cohn-Casson, whose work among the Masai, and whose fate at the hands...
...polished, in fact. Cartwright's characters have more than one dimension, and his view of a culturally debased world is properly droll. But he can't resist tarting up his tale with a bit of porn and pretense. He gravely quotes Elie Wiesel on how Auschwitz negates any attempt to fictionalize it, and then includes fictional scenes of the Holocaust. And did Cartwright really have to call his journalist hero Curtiz, which sounds like Joseph Conrad's Kurtz? Can't anybody write about Africa without invoking Heart of Darkness...
These multiple perspectives inform Cambridge, his fourth and best selling novel so far, recently reissued in paperback. A historical novel set in the early 19th century, the book narrates the journey of the Englishwoman Emily Cartwright to an unnamed Caribbean is land to look after affairs on her father's plantation estate. Part of the book is told from her point of view, part from that of an educated, African-born Christian slave named Cambridge...
Goldberg had a giddy challenge with Williams and the Genie. Animator Randy Cartwright faced a daunting one: to create a character, the Magic Carpet, literally out of whole cloth. The Carpet has no head, no voice, and mere tassels for hands and feet. Yet it has a personality that puts most live- action stars to shame. It can mope, strut, cringe. It is a gentleman and a matchmaker. It holds and kisses Jasmine's hand. It makes zigzag stairs of itself at the end of Aladdin's ride with Jasmine and, as she stands on her balcony, coaxes...