Word: protagonist
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Then again, perhaps his persistence was rooted in the sentiments of his protagonist, Duncan Thaw, an angst-ridden young painter who observes that “Someone might work and work at a thing, not because they were encouraged, but because they never learned to enjoy anything else...
...fictional haunts. Alatriste, a feature film based largely on the first book and starring Viggo Mortensen (The Lord of the Rings), will open in Europe and the U.S. later this year. With a $28 million budget, it's the most expensive Spanish-language film ever made in Spain. The protagonist of this franchise is perhaps the least dashing, most enigmatic hero ever to rattle a rapier. Alatriste speaks little, drinks alone, dresses badly and blunders into traps set by more cunning adversaries. But he is fearless, deadly with a blade and, beneath his armored persona, stubbornly loyal. Those qualities animate...
...subtly powerful depiction of a family trying to cope with the accidental death of a son. It was that film that may have marked the real watershed in Moretti's career. Until then, he had essentially played himself in nearly all his dozen-plus movies, even when the protagonist was a famous politician with amnesia (Palombella Rossa, or Red Wood Pigeon) or a local priest with anger-management issues (La Messa è Finita, or The Mass has Ended). Moretti's serial use of a humorous, self-referencing onscreen persona - and one plagued with late 20th century, middle-class angst...
...Roth's credit that he cannot quite bring himself to write a book as dull and flat as Everyman's concept seems to demand. His style repeatedly breaks its leash, as at the funeral, when the protagonist's brother gives a moving eulogy and his estranged son struggles violently against unbidden grief. But then the narrator interjects that there had been 500 funerals in New Jersey that day and that except for the aforementioned moments, this one was "no more or less interesting than any of the others." It's an astonishing passage: an author arguing, against the evidence...
Roth is too well attuned a writer to win this argument. His protagonist's memories of his boyhood are crystalline: "He ran home barefoot and wet and salty, remembering the mightiness of that immense sea boiling in his own two ears and licking his forearm to taste his skin fresh from the ocean and baked by the sun." And Roth conjures an understated, haunting set piece in which the man visits the cemetery and chats with the affable worker who will soon dig his grave. These are glimpses of the Everyman whose story would have been more powerful had Roth...