Word: protagonist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...modern American readers, Tolstoy's life sometimes reads like a 19th century version of Portnoy's Complaint, in which the protagonist never stops griping that his desires are repugnant to his morals. Tolstoy's diaries and instructional writings are engorged with this seriocomic theme, a fact that led Biographer Henri Troyat to conclude more than 20 years ago that Russia's literary icon was "a billy-goat pining for purity...
...movie is powered by the director's sense of kinship with his protagonist. Indeed, it is possible that if Coppola had been able to make this picture when he wanted to, he and his audience would have been spared much painful groping. For since 1974, when he released The Godfather, Part II and The Conversation almost simultaneously, he has been a stylist in search of a subject. Even in the midst of a mess like The Cotton Club (1984), he was capable of striking stunning imagery, bold intensifications of reality that lodged permanently in one's movie memory...
...that are an essential part of the Los Angeles cityscape. Add to that sentiment the claims of family, the primal unit of Hispanic life. The Mexican poet Octavio Paz recently described it. "In the North American ethic" he wrote, "the center is the individual; in Hispanic morals the true protagonist is the family." It shows in the work of a photographer like Tony Mendoza. He sees in his extended Cuban family what it is that sometimes makes * them comic, but he also knows that their fate is his, their picture...
...pressured into the army and then into an unsuitable, short-lived marriage. Since then, he has carefully constructed a hermetic existence designed to protect himself from all surprises. His plan works, until the morning he discovers a pigeon staring at him in the hallway outside his attic room. The protagonist of German Author Patrick Suskind's second novel seems as commonplace as the monstrous main character of his first, the international best seller Perfume (1986), was bizarre. Such appearances are deceiving. The Pigeon is a small, unassuming paradigm of psychological terror and comedy. With remarkable grace and compression, Suskind displays...
...fictionalized but accurate portrayal of early U.S. adventurism in Viet Nam, an American bomb- assassination plot aimed at corrupt South Vietnamese officers goes awry, killing innocent shoppers and children in a Saigon square. Amid the carnage, a confrontation ensues between Alden Pyle, the well-meaning but naive protagonist, and the novel's narrator, a British journalist...