Word: protagonist
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...Like his creator, the novel's central character Ritwik is gifted and from Kolkata - and desires above all to leave it (Mukherjee's loathing of his birthplace is on record). Thanks to an Oxford scholarship, our protagonist absconds to England - so far, so autobiographical - but, as in all good novels of identity and redemption, he is hotly pursued by his past, or what Mukherjee calls "the gratuitous tyranny of memory." In this case, it's more than a literary device. Flashbacks of Ritwik's dreadful childhood - hallucinations of his late abusive mother terrify him in his college room - animate...
Because the protagonist, Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rahim), enters the prison at the age of nineteen after dropping out of school at eleven, the film isn’t as much a gangster picture as it is a bildungsroman. He doesn’t just learn how to kill people, or how to build a drug empire from the inside; El Djebena also learns how to read and write. Through his brief encounters on the outside, he also discovers what there is to live for in the real world...
...balancing on the edge of a precipice. For Proust, that loss surrounds mortality and the desire to mentally ward it off at all costs; for the narrator, it is simply a question of “lying low” and warding off the cruelty of lovers. Yet the protagonist and Clara, caught in their self-involved and unspectacular web of emotions, are too banal for Aciman’s trick to work, and the protagonist’s dense, slogging thoughts form a thicket of angst that paralyses the narrative. He despairingly thinks, “It occurred...
...only dynamic motif in “Eight White Nights” is the coded language that the lovers invent in order to communicate with each other. One of Aciman’s more inspired devices, it infuses the relationship between Clara and the protagonist with the warmth and poignancy of two kindred spirits attempting to invent a hermetic universe for themselves. They invent the terms “otherpeoples” and “Shukoffs” in their very first conversation, referring to the mass of boring, unimaginative humans who surround them. Their conversation continues, full...
...order to give context to the disembodied desire of his two lovers, Aciman references a bygone European past, but manages to trivialize it by reducing it to a simple, romantic picture of the Old Country. Both Clara and the protagonist come from an Eastern European, Jewish background and move about in a world with scattered references to Dostoevsky, Rilke, Rohmer, St. Petersburg, Bellagio and Byzantium—one that is faded around the edges like a sepia photograph...