Word: chekhov
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Some of the stories in Back in the World are little more than personality sketches. But in the best entries, the author commands a range of styles that recall the captivating doldrums of Chekhov and the eerie menace of Paul Bowles. Wolff also demonstrates a stinging wit. An old Irish priest likes to tell his parishioners and colleagues that he does not have time to die. "One night he said it at dinner and Father Leo thought, Make time." That is a line worthy of Oscar Wilde. --By R.Z. Sheppard
...Broadway hit two seasons ago. Seven earlier scripts have been produced, most of them in London and by companies in Seattle, Dallas, Washington and New Haven. His dark comedy Benefactors is the Broadway season's most acclaimed play. Wild Honey, Frayn's bold adaptation of the young Anton Chekhov's Platonov, packed the house at London's National Theater and is due in the U.S. this fall. And in March, Frayn's first film, a rueful comedy called Clockwise, opens in Lon don. Typical of Frayn, who has "always adored farce," his plot revolves around a social-climbing headmaster (John...
Wilson has caught up on his reading a bit since then; he is a fan of Chekhov and has seen a few more (but only a few) Shakespeare plays. He goes to movies rarely and says that for 11 straight years, starting in 1980, he didn't see a single one. (The last film he saw before he quit was Raging Bull, directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Robert De Niro; the first one when he came back was Scorsese and De Niro's Cape Fear, so he figured he hadn't missed much.) He avoids the media spotlight, living...
...basic black is a means of ostentatious discretion. On the other hand, the angry black of the new wave--dark glasses, sour black T shirts and scruffy black jeans--is more the anarchist's traditional black. It is neo-beatnik, the color correlate of the adolescent angst satirized by Chekhov. Why do you always wear black? Masha's suitor asks her in the opening scene of The Seagull. "I am in mourning for my life," the girl declares...
...Murakami's Japan is a land of truck stops, rock music, Ray-Bans, Hollywood movies and workouts at the gym. But for his youngish, hip, history-oblivious fans, this is Japan. More than previous Murakami novels, Kafka embraces nearly the entire Western canon, with learned digressions on Beethoven, Schubert, Chekhov, T.S. Eliot and a pantheon of ancient Greeks. It's an education in a box, much like the small but mysteriously well-stocked Takamatsu library where Murakami's young Oedipus finds a job as live-in caretaker. He is no ordinary 15-year-old. As well-read as a professor...