A Year's Reading: Other Fiction - E through Z and Movies

READ FOR THE FIRST TIME: OTHER FICTION - continued

George Eliot
(June-July) <Scenes of Clerical Life>, 1857

Three long stories. "The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton",
Eliot's first fiction, includes a sort of manifesto in its Chapter V:
it urges the importance (perhaps even superiority) of fiction with
outwardly unremarkable protagonists. "Mr Gilfil's Love-Story" and
"Janet's Repentance" followed. Each was serialised in <Blackwood's
Edinburgh Magazine>, respectively for two, four, and five months of
1857 (omitting only December); the edition I read represents mostly
the first book edition of the following year. Formally, in their
simple plots and restricted casts of characters, the first two are
novellas, but bulked enough by the omniscient narrator's descriptions
and ruminations that word counts might disagree; the third, I think,
is both formally and by size a short novel. All were based on real
people (and some of them complained), of the author's youthful
neighbourhood, in Warwickshire about twenty miles east of Birmingham.
Eliot poses as a man not only in pen name but also, here, through a
narrative voice which the final story explicitly represents as that of
a man of around her own age, who becomes a trivial character.

In all three stories, despite the title's final word, death features
prominently. "Amos Barton" is a "tragedy" in the common sense, though
not, I think, the literary, and there's little more I can say without
spoilers; it's set mostly in 1837. In the other stories this life
remains very much a vale of tears, but the focus is instead on
redemption; I like these more hopeful stories better. "Mr Gilfil's
Love-Story" concerns a love triangle in 1788; a peroration at its end,
apparently added at the publisher's behest, anticipates my own
self-image, in a way more objective than comfortable, long before my
birth. "Janet's Repentance" involves an unhappy wife, a
self-sacrificing minister, and their relations through church
politics, charity, and friendship, around 1832; it's the most complex
not only in plot, but also morally, and I think it much the richest of
the three.

"Mr Gilfil's Love-Story" is the only one to have been filmed, in 1920,
per the IMDB, which also asserts that all seven of Eliot's later
novels have been, um, rendered visual, but two - <Felix Holt> and
<Romola> - likewise only in the silent era. (The DVD of <Broken
Blossoms> includes clips from <Romola>; the link is Lillian Gish.)
I'm mildly surprised that at a time when <Brokeback Mountain>, <The
Last Mimzy>, and <Away from Her> severally reveal filmmakers grasping
that short fiction is easier than novels to turn into movies, none of
these <Scenes> is being considered - but someone is actually trying to
boil down <Middlemarch> to feature length for the first time! Only
<Silas Marner> has hit the big screen in the past seventy years, and
only under a different title, but TV - mainly the BBC - has been
fairly good to Eliot, <Scenes> aside: productions of <Adam Bede> and
<Daniel Deronda>, two of <Middlemarch>, and three each of <Silas
Marner> and <The Mill on the Floss>. (For more on these, see the list
of movies below.) This is probably a function of the BBC's famous
stodginess. Eliot's plots tend to complexity, she depicts few balls,
and in the book at hand there is only one great house, which is
undergoing renovations, hence far from splendid - so the lack of
Hollywood versions is a limited surprise. As for these stories, well,
I suspect the problem is this: they're far too Christian to find
their natural audience on channels like Lifetime and Oxygen, but Eliot
was far too notoriously an apostate for the Christian channels to pick
them up.

<Middlemarch> is generally acclaimed as one of the greatest novels in
English, but is widely un- or under-appreciated; this has led to a
standard diagnosis of its detractors, which is, essentially,
childishness. (At least, I *think* I've seen this elsewhere than in
Virginia Woolf's famous comment that it's "one of the few English
novels for grown-ups".) Both one's æsthetic and one's personality
must be fully adult to value <Middlemarch> as one ought, so the story
goes. Well, I've never valued <Middlemarch> as one ought - not even,
as with such Thomas Hardy novels as I've read, coupled with a silent
sigh of relief that *that's* over with. (OK, I admit it: in the case
of <Jude the Obscure> the sigh was neither silent nor lacking in
profanity...) Indeed, I also once managed to read <Silas Marner>
without liking Eliot any better (but all I remember of that book is
that it does *so* differ from <The Vicar of Wakefield>, because it has
a different title; no, I didn't like Goldsmith either). So I wondered
whether approaching her in my preferred way, chronologically, would
teach me to appreciate her, or whether I must simply resign myself to
permanent infantilism. Well, we'll see; I'm in no hurry now to read
<Adam Bede>, let alone <The Mill on the Floss> whose ending a
reference book gave away; but in two of these stories I did find much
to like.

James Bernard Frost
(May) <World Leader Pretend>, 2007, skimmed

This book is shelved as science fiction in Seattle's libraries. But
the only things in it that clearly separate its fictional world from
the real world, near as I can tell, are actually auctorial mistakes.
(For example, he gets the date of a D&D book wrong, and no, there
isn't a more convincingly spec-ficnal mistake than that.) <World
Leader Pretend> *is* weird for the fun of it, in that by now tiresome
postmodern way, but it isn't the New Weird! Four main characters are
highlighted on the back cover of the trade paperback I borrowed: one
is a Bangkok street kid, which makes her by far the most ordinary of
the four; another is rich and paralysed; one is in Antarctica; and the
fourth is a former dot-com millionaire. I twice bailed after spending
too much time around this fourth character's insane twin sister, in
particular, on the second attempt, after discovering the Childhood
Sexual Abuse Explanation for her madness. Sigh. (To be strictly
fair, Frost proffers it as a *possible* explanation.) Anyway, then,
the book's "science fiction" status seems to come from its being about
computer games of a sort that already exist, and perhaps from its
having the paralysed character use technologies that paralysed people
(at least, ones as wealthy as he) already use.

So, um, yeah. The book is largely about the four characters and
others interacting in a massively multi-player online game called The
Realm, which is essentially <Civilization> writ large; it tells us
enough about the first three's offline lives to make sense of them,
and rather more about the twins. Frost has as an overt purpose
describing the education of Character #4 in human wisdom; his implied
covert purpose is to explain that human contact over the nets is more
innocent, and capable of more reality and good, than usually
understood. Obviously I'm predisposed to buy this argument, but I
don't see how weirdness makes it more believable.

Stella Gibbons
(June) <Cold Comfort Farm>, 1932, started
(June) <The Gentle Powers> (apparently aka <Westwood>), 1946

As a general rule, to borrow any particular DVD from the Seattle
Public Library you must place a hold. However, at any given time
perhaps .1-5% of the DVDs the library owns are actually shelved, and
one day this portion included the 1995 movie of <Cold Comfort Farm>.
While the movie didn't much delight me (no more the book's opening),
it did make me curious about the author, who seemed to have written
for adults a sort of book usually found only for children.

The Seattle Public Library's only other book by Gibbons is <The Gentle
Powers>. This is set across a year late in World War II (probably
1943-44), mostly in London (though it ends elsewhere). As it opens,
Hilda Wilson is expecting a visit from her best friend, Margaret
Steggles. Hilda is a pretty, vivacious, conventional young woman, and
conventionally enough, her friend is none of these things. The book's
third-person POV follows various characters, generally one at a time,
but fundamentally, this is the bildungsroman of plain, sensitive,
idealistic Margaret, who comes to London from the provinces and falls
in, largely through her own deliberate efforts, with a rather mingy
artistic crowd, consisting of one lofty playwright, his painter
son-in-law, and their various relations, friends, and servants.
Actually, it's primarily through their servants that Margaret comes to
know them, and I'm impressed by the way the book managed to rouse my
interest in whether this made sense, class-wise, or not, given my own
fundamental uninterest in the British class system. At any rate, the
book is a far more palatable, rather plainer written and rather less
despairing, study of a young woman's not getting married than either
of the Elizabeth Bowen novels described above, and I can recommend it
to anyone who finds this description interesting.

Oddly, several of Gibbons's titles sound like fantasy; these include,
besides the present volume, arguably <The Woods in Winter>, less
arguably <The Snow Woman>, and rather definitely <The Shadow of a
Sorcerer>. I don't know whether any of those actually are spec-ficnal
(though she has no entry in the Clute encyclopædiæ), but I can
assert flatly that <The Gentle Powers> is not.

Sue Grafton
0$ (July) <'A' Is for Alibi>, 1982

Eh. I'd been curious about this series for a long time (two other
volumes are stored where my copy of this one is), but it was clearly a
mistake. I figured out at least some of the mystery less than halfway
through, and after I'd read this book, I extrapolated from its body
count, the number of volumes in the series (#19, the last in the used
bookstore in question, is set just six years later than #1), and the
fact that none of those I examined *lacked* a dead body in the back
cover copy - from all this I extrapolated that Kinsey Millhone has to
solve the equivalent of the murder rate of at least one moderate-sized
city, all by her lonesome. Sheesh, and they call space colonies
implausible!

In case anyone cares, this is yer typical PI solving a murder mystery
noir, variant "the PI's a woman so of course she falls for someone
Bad" (and this is not a spoiler; there are several Bad men, and they
don't have a monopoly on crime in the book). What makes it mildly
different is that the case she starts with is eight years cold. The
main entertainment value I found in it was the sheer weirdness of
Millhone's voice, which I could understand as contemporary, but which
recounts detection work of the pre-Internet era - y'know, physically
going to government offices for public records, and like that? So
that provided some cognitive dissonance with which to keep going. But
I doubt I'll read any of the much longer volumes that followed this
one.

Elizabeth Inchbald
(May) <Lovers' Vows>, 1798

A play, in five short acts, loosely adapted from <Das Kind der Liebe>,
German, 1791, by August Friedrich Ferdinand von Kotzebue. A family
melodrama, silly but readable. It's the play that figures prominently
in Austen's <Mansfield Park>, hence included in the Norton Critical
Edition of that novel, and hence, in turn, read by me, somewhat before
I re-read the novel.

Inchbald's <A Simple Story>, 1791, is one of those Austen predecessors
I mentioned lacking access to. (It's really frustrating that
Charlotte Lennox's <The Female Quixote>, 1752, is another, my copy
being in storage; AIUI that book could be as relevant to the history
of fantasy as is its acknowledged predecessor.) Weeks before this
posting I managed to buy a copy, but had way too many library books
piled up to read first, so no discussion here.

Rachel Kadish
(July) <Tolstoy Lied: A Love Story>, 2006

The title refers to the opening line of <Anna Karenina> (not one of
the Tolstoy books I've read). Since I've always felt betrayed by
Dostoevsky's *not* having written the book <The Brothers Karamazov>
supposedly prologued, I could hardly resist. I'm tolerably sure that
"Tolstoy lied" is the author's premise, but it's certainly her first
person protagonist/narrator's - the core of the research she wants to
work on *after* she gets tenure.

I picked this book up to read a little before bed, and put it down at
about 4:30 am. Oops. I like it a lot - I expect, sometime when I
have money, to look for a copy to buy - but I'm not as confident as
I'd wish to be about that liking. The setup: Our Heroine is an
assistant professor of English Literature in Manhattan (seemingly
NYU); early in her tenure year, she falls in love. The tenure plot,
the romance, and her work with a graduate student she's advising play
off each other not (primarily) at the plot level, but thematically,
and there they do so intricately. I'll have to revise this note
whenever I decide whether I believe the book instantiates its
narrator's thesis, that it is possible and worthwhile to write about
happiness.

(Sigh. I suppose I should clarify that the author is not a professor,
at least to judge by her author bio. I know that many many mainstream
novels are written by professors of English, and that way too many of
*those* also *star* professors of English. In this case, however,
Kadish gets at least three major things by using this trope: one, a
strong linkage between the stated theme and the character's life; two,
the whole tenure plot, with all the attendant academic politics; and
three, the nearly in loco parentis role of dissertation adviser with
which to make the heroine think about love, parenthood, and such
things.)

(July-August) <From a Sealed Room>, ?1996-1998, first compiled as such
1998

The cover and spine give the title as <From A Sealed Room>, probably
because in the font used, the A is gorgeous, and integral to the cover
design. The copyright page says some of the book previously appeared
in <Bomb>, but not when; the only online table of contents for that
journal containing Kadish's name is dated 1996.

Anyway. I wanted to see if my disclaimer was right; and indeed,
Kadish's first novel is *not* about any English professors. The first
part is set in Jerusalem in 1990 (the title's "sealed room" resulted
from the Scud attacks during the Gulf War), and seen from the third
person POV of Tami Shachar, wife, mother, and above all daughter, who
seems incapable of happiness, not least thanks to having been raised,
after her father's death, by a scintillating, charming mother with no
capacity for comfort. The rest is set in 1993, largely in Jerusalem,
and has two narrators. Shifra Feldstein, whose parts are in italics,
survived Dachau, and is not sane [a]; even before the Holocaust, her
grip was at least shaky, thanks largely to cold, scheming parents with
no capacity for comfort. The main narrator, Maya, a distant cousin of
Tami's whose surname we never learn, is an American college student
studying abroad, who allows a man seemingly constructed from a
checklist of "Signs of an Abuser" to sweep her off her feet, partly
because his passionate need for her addresses her rejection, after her
father's departure, by a judgementally activist mother with no
capacity for comfort. All three POV characters can be difficult to
read: Tami is bitter, Shifra lyrical and burning, and Maya muffled,
not affectless but disturbingly close.

So: Kadish's main concern here is not with domestic violence, or the
Holocaust, or the discussions of peace in "the Middle East" that were
so prevalent in 1993, or even Tami's <New Yorker>-style middle-aged
miseries. It is with the burden of the past, and especially the past
as instantiated by parents, or mothers. (To be fair, the Holocaust
and the "peace process" both get Kadish's attention to the extent that
they also instantiate the past as burden.) Shifra charges Maya, as
both mothers charge their daughters, with the urgent need to "set the
past at rest". Maya's dangerous boyfriend is more an example of the
past's dangers than a real obstacle in his own right. In the middle
three parts, Maya's voice veers between past and present tenses; when
in the final part she adds the future tense to the mix, I'm unsure
which of her concluding pages are meant to be story, prophecy, or
wishful thinking.

Elizabeth Bowen's first two novels made perfect sense to me as coming
from the same author; Jane Austen's reversals (see the re-reading
post) do too. I still don't know whether <Tolstoy Lied> instantiates
the premise that happy families *aren't* all alike, and therefore are
worth writing about, but <From a Sealed Room> certainly goes some way
towards instantiating the *other* possible meaning of "Tolstoy lied",
a premise that unhappy families *are* all alike. I didn't mention
that an unhappy family in <Tolstoy Lied> is led by a sternly religious
father with no capacity for comfort, either. But to be quite fair I
should note that Maya's madman *does* have that capacity, vestigially;
were he to reach his logical conclusion, he would certainly, after
killing his beloved, stroke her cheek and croon to her. Does
*alikeness* make unhappy families worth writing about, and so justify
<From a Sealed Room> ? I've suggested a way to reconcile Rachel
Kadish's first two novels with each other, but it's inherently
self-contradictory, and I just don't get it; perhaps it's simpler to
note the long gap between the books.

[a] Shifra's narrative is problematic, politically: I don't know
enough about the range of mental illnesses to justify my unhappiness
with her madness, but I'm quite sure that the form it takes will lack
delight for at least some non-Americans.

Terry Moore
* (October) <Child of Rage>, 2000-2001
* (October) <Flower to Flame>, 2002-2003

Two more volumes in my ongoing effort to collect <Strangers in
Paradise>, a comic-book melodrama that's just about as extreme in plot
as it can be *without* being spec-ficnal (to say that organised crime
is heavily involved is at once true, misleading in several ways, and
tamer than the actual weirdness). But it somehow manages to keep
believable characters at the centre of its outlandish situations. By
the time you read this, <Strangers>, which is its author's main claim
to fame in the way common to independent books I like [b], will have
ended. Please, nobody tell me how.

I don't remember either of these volumes as especially revelatory
(though there is one thing that surprised me, which it would be a
spoiler to explain).

[b] Jeff Smith and <Bone>, also now ended; Martin Wagner and
<Hepcats>, abandoned; Mark Oakley and <Thieves and Kings>, continuing,
last I heard.

(September) <Brave New World>, 2001-2002

Oddly, given that I'd already read two of the four issues this volume
contains, this was more revelatory. Unfortunately, this is about
where the Seattle Public Library's collection of <Strangers in
Paradise> stops. Sigh.

Tom Perrotta
* (May) <Little Children>, 2004, lightly skimmed

Musical beds in the suburbs, mixed with the Drama and Excitement of A
Child Molester In Our Midst, Eeeeek. Yawn. Well, $2 for a used
paperback was cheaper than seeing the movie would have been in this
town, and I'd been mildly interested in the movie (OK, OK, mainly
because it has Jennifer Connelly in it), so I guess this wasn't a
complete loss.

Michael Pye
(February) <The Drowning Room>, 1995

This book is far enough into stylistic oddity that it can be read by
readers of literary spec-fic even though there is, in the end (minor
spoiler), nothing truly spec-ficnal about it. It's a rich evocation
of the life of Grietje Reyniers, probably the most interesting single
person of her time and place, to the mid-1640s; since it's the only
novel known to me set (partly) *in* that time and place - Nieuw
Nederlandt under Governor Willem Kieft, of special interest to me as
mentioned in the fantasy post - I ate it up. The author makes it
clear that he's inventing much of Reyniers' story (essentially, the
entire 2/3rds of the book that precedes the New World part has no
known evidence to back it), but I find nothing implausible; we do know
from Nieuw Nederlandt records that Reyniers really was what authors of
the past two decades have been so desperate to find, a colourful and
independent woman in pre-modern times. Pye's meditative tone and
choice of structure (much of the book is flashbacks, told by Reyniers
for reasons that only gradually become clear) prevent this colour from
becoming garish, and humanise the woman behind some of the strangest
stories of earliest New York. Bottom line: I'm biased by the
setting, but I still *think* I can recommend this to literary-minded
spec-fic readers.

(Any authors reading this take note: Reyniers was not the *only*
interesting person in that setting, and Pye doesn't even mention
another of them, Jan Jansen Damen, a Pillar of Society with a violent
streak and lots of conflict at home, inter alia over the genocidal
wars on the Indians he helped plot in the 1640s.)

Darieck Scott
(July) <Traitor to the Race>, 1995

A book by a black gay man with (I think) a white lover, whose main POV
character is a black gay man with a white lover. Said lover also gets
significant amounts of POV time (and there are also substantial
third-person chunks). One index to the differences between the lovers
is that sections told in first person by the black one, Kenneth
Gabriel, are headed "Kenneth Watches", while those told in first
person by the white one are headed "The Adventures of Evan Marcialis".
That said, the book begins and ends with a different POV, one who can
tell us more than they about the book's central concern - the rape and
murder of Kenneth's cousin when he (yes, *he*) happens upon, and thus
interferes with, a gang rape - but who understands, I think, less.
Anyway, Scott seems to use this incident to bring together in one
book's worth of time, a few weeks perhaps, the reflections on race and
sexuality that Kenneth (and to a lesser extent Evan) might otherwise
have taken years to come up with; to make the most of the situation
summed up in hatred by the title.

On the acknowledgements page of his much later <Hex: A Novel of Love
Spells>, discussed in the fantasy post, Scott describes himself as "a
committed fantasist". If this commitment can be seen here, it's only
through identifying Scott further with Kenneth Gabriel. Both Kenneth
and Evan are actors, but Kenneth is the one who initiates most of
their role-playing "Games", which are generally both actorly and
sexual exercises, and the one who spends much of his time (he works a
lot less than Evan) "inhabit"ing what he imagines about those he sees
around town. The increasing prominence of Kenneth's "inhabitation" as
the book goes on does much to mute the political in it and emphasise
the artistic. Well, whether or not "committed fantasist" makes sense,
at least the word "committed" is by itself easier to defend: the two
books, twelve years apart, name the same person in ways that I see as
identifying him as Scott's lover.[1]

Like other books in this post, this one is set in Manhattan, but over
three centuries later, essentially in the then-present.

Jo Walton
Nominee, 2001, and winner, 2002 John W. Campbell Awards for Best New
Writer

(July and September) <Farthing>, 2006
Nominee, 2007 Campbell Award, Nebula Award for Novel, and Sidewise
Award for Long-Form

OK, fair's fair: those lists of award nominees posted at Elliott Bay
*did* make me aware of this one. (And to be even fairer, I'll note
that when I established that my branch library actually had a copy on
hand, I preserved that astonishing state of affairs by using the hold
system.)

I was taken aback to discover that Walton's newest book was not only
an alternate history - and one with that theme so peculiarly
unappealing to me, "The Third Reich survives" [c] - but also a murder
mystery. So on first approach I stopped very early and skimmed a
little towards the end; then put the book aside for a month.

Well, I was better prepared on the second try, but I still wish I
hadn't read this back to back with <Greywalker>. Walton's fifth novel
is not only an alternate history and a murder mystery; it's also a
cautionary tale, with rather more than a hint of "It can happen here"
to it. It is set in various parts of southern England, especially the
eponymous manor house, scene of the murder (of the man who negotiated
peace with Germany in 1941, Minister of Education in the outgoing
Conservative government); it covers the days 5th to 10th May, 1949.
(Walton should probably have looked at a calendar for 1949 before
dating it so precisely, though; the 7th of May was not in fact a
Monday that year.) The two POV characters are (3rd person) the
inspector from Scotland Yard, and (1st person) Lucy Kahn, née
Eversley, the scandalously married daughter of the Viscount whose
house Farthing is.

In her LiveJournal account (URL below), Walton refers to two sequels,
neither of which I've yet seen, and to the final book as having a
"happy ending". She also cites as common the question how any happy
ending could be possible; indeed! By putting the peace in mid-1941,
before the US entered the war and before Hitler broke with Stalin,
Walton succeeds in utterly recasting the shape of mid-century
politics. James Nicoll recently posted here a pointer to an essay
(URL below) about how poor the world was in 1900; well, the people
running major countries in <Farthing> are people who vehemently
disapprove of every change since that date, if they're even prepared
to countenance the *nineteenth* century. I don't see how you can get
there - a happy ending - from here - <Farthing>.

But I also don't see how you can get there - <Farthing> - from here -
our real world. I don't know whether the British political system is
so set up that a single assassination could really turn it upside
down; I do know that assassinations have *consistently* failed to
wreck the American system (see, in particular, events in the 1860s and
the 1960s-70s), and that Canadian governments get turned out of office
like clockwork every two decades or so over corruption. Maybe I'm
just naïve and complacent, but seems to me the people running the US
government for at least the past six years are every bit as ruthless
as the people depicted in <Farthing>, and every bit as interested in
becoming Evil Overlords, and they have signally failed to get anywhere
near so close to their goal. So should I stop looking in this book
for references to my own arrogant land, and instead read it as an
attack on current trends in the politics of Canada - where, I think,
it was written - or the UK - Walton's home country? I actually spent
some time trying to figure out how many countries *have* discarded
deep-seated democratic or republican institutions for dictatorship,
and frankly, the list doesn't strike me as all that long. (Rome; very
arguably Germany; I'm not sure whether it's happened in Dutch history;
you could make the claim for some South American countries, though not
Mexico ... ).

I dunno. I owe Ms. Walton a lot for informing me, back when the
writing she was best known for was either gaming materials or her
excellent posts right here, of the Martin Pippin books by Eleanor
Farjeon. And this is a book eminently worth reading - even though I
purposely wrecked it for myself as a mystery, and even though I don't
like its alt-hist scenario - for its characterisation of a woman who's
smarter than she thinks, and a man who's less upright than he does;
for its depiction of an England gone to seed; even for making me argue
with it. But it has not persuaded me of the thesis many of the
blurbists claim it has; while I'm prepared to buy quite a few "It can
happen here" arguments, I don't buy this one.

[c] Despite my name, all branches of Judaism agree with me that I'm
not a Jew. However, Nazis disagree. And I learned fairly early that
Israel's Law of the Return does not apply to people like me.
Concretely, the events in <Farthing> *wouldn't* have happened to my
parents when they lived in England in the late 1950s and early 1960s,
because my parents never moved in such rarefied political circles as
the otherwise similar, though earlier, couple in the book, but I don't
find that especially reassuring.

<http://papersky.livejournal.com>, seen (much later than the first
time) October 8, 2007; I didn't look up all of the particular
relevant entries, but one is around July 8, 2007, and the others
should be near it
<http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/08/slouching-tow-1.html>, seen,
for the second time, October 12, 2007

Louis Zara
(February) <Blessed Is the Land>, 1954, skimmed

An origin myth for New York Jews, somewhat turgid; I found it
thoroughly conservative, but a Jew reading in the 1950s might not have
(the narrator/protagonist, for example, has lovers not only outside
his faith but outside his race). Also, though it took me a while to
sort this out, it starts rather later than 1640. I found no obvious
historical flaws in what I did read: when I say "origin myth" I'm
referring to the fictional details, but it's well established that New
York's first Jews did come from Brazil, as depicted here.

Movies that would, if books, fit in this post, are of course far more
numerous than books:

<Broken Blossoms>, 1919, started (two different copies became
unplayable in roughly the same part of the movie, and I was told
that one of those had only been checked out four times, so my guess
is that the DVDs were mismade);
<Grand Hotel>, 1932;
<Footlight Parade>, 1933;
<42nd Street>, 1933 (at last);
<Dames>, 1934 (in which Joan Blondell got top billing, way too few
spoken lines, and, I'm afraid, way too many sung ones; now I know
why she spoke, rather than sang, "Forgotten Man"; sometimes
considered part of the <Gold Diggers> series, on which see the
series post, but shares fewer themes and cast members with the two
so-titled movies in these posts than they do with each other);
<Gold Diggers of 1935>, 1935;
* <The Awful Truth>, 1937;
<Shall We Dance>, 1937 (sigh; if any of the Astaire-Rogers movies I'd
seen before made me cringe anywhere near so many times, memory has
mercifully blotted it out);
<Ups and Downs>, 1937 (a rather silly short, but rewarding for the
opportunity to see June Allyson at the age her character in <Good
News> is supposed to be);
<The Ghost Ship>, 1943;
arguably <The Leopard Man>, 1943 (has one possibly-fantastic element,
which it'd be a spoiler to name, but which I see as instead
cinematic convention);
<Stormy Weather>, 1943;
<State Fair>, 1945;
<Good News>, 1947 (easily the best of these musicals);
<New Orleans>, 1947 (except, perhaps, this one);
<Pinky>, 1949 (about which I have many, but conflicting, comments);
+ <Rashomon>, Japanese, 1950;
<The Lavender Hill Mob>, 1951;
<Lullaby of Broadway>, 1951;
<Call Me Madam>, 1953 (ah, *now* I know why Ethel Merman became a
household name!);
<Kiss Me Kate>, 1953;
<Pyaasa>, Hindi, 1957 (despite a poor transfer to DVD, and although
hardly equal to Satyajit Ray's contemporary Bengali movies, this is
a worthwhile social melodrama, and as an added bonus, unlike most
recent Indian musicals I've seen, has lyrics that *actually relate
to the plot* ! imagine that! oh, and if you do read the extremely
spoiler-heavy back of the DVD box, fear not; though it seems to
give away the entire plot, it doesn't);
<Lola>, French, 1961;
arguably <Fruit of Paradise>, Czech, 1969 (though indeed surreal, as
the box describes it, its fundamental story is fairly conventional
and does not strike me as fantasy; but I could be wrong);
<Goodbye, Columbus>, 1969 (which helped me decide against reading any
of Philip Roth's fiction anytime soon!);
<Half a Sixpence>, 1969 (a musical based on an H. G. Wells novel?
sign me up! only, oops, <Kipps> is Cod Leftist Wells, not at all
Visionary Wells; nearly as disappointing qua musical; but see
anonymous in the fantasy post for an arguable spec-fic connection
after all);
<The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie>, 1969 (imagine my surprise when, a
week or so later, I found Muriel Spark listed in the <Encyclopedia
of Fantasy>, though at least her book of this title isn't mentioned
there);
<1776>, 1972;

next an improbable string of British TV productions...

<The Brontës of Haworth>, 1974 (YTV, inadequately produced, and
though written by Christopher Fry, not as affecting as I'd
expected);
<Pennies from Heaven>, 1978 (not the Steve Martin movie, but its
source: the Ben Hoskins BBC miniseries - also, I think, ancestral
to both <Moulin Rouge!> and <Dancer in the Dark>, both of which
are, thank God, far shorter than this, which is much the most
disturbing musical I've yet seen);
<Silas Marner>, 1985 (BBC, with Ben Kingsley; somewhat easier to bear
as movie than as book, or perhaps in middle age than in youth);
* <The Lady's Not for Burning>, 1987 (YTV again, and of course much
better work by Fry than the first in this sub-list);

<Why has Bodhi-Dharma Left for the East?>, Korean, 1989 (which I now
regret not having seen on the big screen, for its ravishing
images);
<Days of Being Wild>, Cantonese, 1990 (disproving the maxim that the
first movie in a series is always the best, but that's no surprise
when <In the Mood for Love>'s the second);

and then the unbroken chain of recent years:

* <The Snapper>, 1993 (the IMDB says this was BBC);
<The Browning Version>, 1994;
<Middlemarch>, 1994 (BBC, specifically the miniseries starring Juliet
Aubrey and Douglas Hodge, although, of course, like all movies of
the 1990s with British performers it features both Rufus Sewell and
- well hidden - Judi Dench; oh, and yes, I do now see that
<Middlemarch> is among other things a manual of ways to ensure
happiness or un in marriage ... but am still unable to convince
myself that I should therefore re-read it);
<Cold Comfort Farm>, 1995 (BBC);
<Pride and Prejudice>, 1995 (this is the rightfully much-praised BBC
miniseries starring Jennifer Ehle, now high on my list of most-
lusted-after DVDs);
* <Bound>, 1996;
<Emma>, 1996;
* <Heavy>, 1996;
* <Ulee's Gold>, 1997;
* <White Lies>, 1997 (CBC);
<The Governess>, 1998 (one could argue, though not very well, that
this is really science fiction, no?);
* <Smoke Signals>, 1998;
* <Felicia's Journey>, 1999;
* <Illuminata>, 1999 (which I liked a lot);
* <Not One Less>, Mandarin, 1999;
<The Other>, Arabic (Egypt), 1999;
* <bread & tulips>, Italian, 2000;
<I Have Found It>, Tamil, 2000 (a moderately loose adaptation of
<Sense and Sensibility>, and a musical with rather sappier songs
than those in <Bride and Prejudice>, with which it shares a star,
Aishwarya Rai, as well as a source; so now I'm wondering whether
anyone's done a Bollywood, or other Indian, <Mansfield Park> ! -
though if so, Ms. Rai would have to play Mary Crawford or one of
the sisters, which might be hard for all concerned...);
* <inspiración>, Spanish, 2001;
<Me Without You>, 2001 (wow);
* <All the Real Girls>, 2002;
not very arguably <Bollywood/Hollywood>, 2002 (there are ghosts, and a
"levitation accident", but I'm pretty sure both are to be taken as,
well, maya; oh, and though the dialogue is in fact mostly in
English - I've no idea how much of that dubbed - the songs - mostly
or entirely dubbed - are mostly in Hindi, and not subtitled on the
"fullscreen" version of the DVD);
* <Far from Heaven>, 2002;
<The Hours>, 2002;
* <How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days>, 2002;
* <Insomnia>, 2002;
* <Alex & Emma>, 2003 (about a book considerably worse than *any*
other book mentioned in these posts);
* <Casa de los Babys>, 2003;
* <Mystic River>, 2003;
arguably * <The Saddest Music in the World>, 2003 (refers directly to
<Footlight Parade>; though it feels like fantasy or at least Weird
Science to me, I find no genuine novum);
<chehraa>, Hindi, 2004;
<A Good Woman>, 2004 (an adaptation of Oscar Wilde's <Lady
Windermere's Fan>);
arguably <House of Flying Daggers>, Mandarin, 2004 (I actually
re-watched a scene to catch the commentary track and find out the
intent of radically changing weather in that scene; turns out the
weather they were shooting under changed and they rolled with it,
so *that* doesn't make it fantasy, and if I called it a fantasy
just because of the ærial combat, I'd have to call, say, <Good
News> a fantasy just because it's a musical);
<Melinda and Melinda>, 2004 (oops, stopped avoiding Woody Allen movies
too soon);
<Sideways>, 2004;
<The Syrian Bride>, Arabic (Golan Heights), 2004;
<Brokeback Mountain>, 2005;
<The 40-Year-Old Virgin>, 2005 (further evidence for Seattle's
nickname "Sodom on the Sound" : the *library* here bought the
[interminable] *un*rated version of this!);
<Fun with *** and Jane>, 2005;
<rumor has it...>, 2005;
<The Upside of Anger>, 2005;
<Walk the Line>, 2005;
<Akeelah and the Bee>, 2006;
+ <Away from Her>, 2006 (how good to live near a Landmark discount
house!);
<Clerks II>, 2006 (sigh);
+ <The Queen>, 2006;
<Step Up>, 2006;
+ <The Valet>, French, 2006;
+ <Waitress>, 2007.

Some movies aren't listed here because so listing them would be a
spoiler; each occupies, for much of its length, the realm of Todorov's
fantastic, and derives much of its strength therefrom. See the
re-reading post for a list of these.

See *also*, in the re-reading post, *actual* re-viewings: <Gold
Diggers of 1933>, 1933; <The Thin Man>, 1934; <Stage Door>, 1937;
<Children of Paradise>, 1945; <Sabrina>, 1954; <West Side Story>,
1961; arguably <Jesus Christ Superstar>, 1973; <Where the Heart Is>,
1990; <Career Opportunities>, 1991; <Rambling Rose>, 1991; <The Scent
of Green Papaya>, 1993; <The Wedding Banquet>, 1993; <Swingers>, 1996;
<Fools Rush In>, 1997; <all I wanna do>, 1998; <Shakespeare in Love>,
1998; <Cruel Intentions>, 1999; <The Road Home>, 1999; <Bring It On>,
2000; <Gladiator>, 2000; <Save the Last Dance>, 2000; <Spring
Forward>, 2000; <Blue Crush>, 2002; <Pride and Prejudice>, 2005;
<Rent>, 2005; <Shopgirl>, 2005; <Take the Lead>, 2006.

--
Joe Bernstein, file clerk, bookkeeper, and writer joe@xxxxxxxxxxx
<http://www.panix.com/~josephb/>
.