Weekend books.

"Otto Preminger was not what you'd call a mild man," writes Liz Brown, reviewing Foster Hirsch's Otto Preminger: The Man Who Would Be King for the Los Angeles Times. "Elaine Barrymore remembers the forbidding, bald Preminger as 'so Germanic that I felt he was more a nation than a human being.'... This comprehensive biography of the redoubtable impresario is the first since Preminger's ghostwritten account in 1977."

The exhibition Dalí: Painting & Film is on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from Sunday through January 6; Richard Schickel reviews the catalog:

Updated through 10/15.

Judging by this volume, the exhibit is mostly an excuse to gather a large number of Dalí's works and perhaps encourage an upward reevaluation of his reputation, in decline for decades, in part because of his clownish, indefatigable self-promotion. The catalog contains many drawings and paintings that Dalí made for the numerous, mostly failed attempts to insinuate himself into the commercial movie world after 1930, but most of the work it reproduces are paintings and other art objects that he either created coincidentally with his film projects or that take up themes and symbols he proposed to use in aborted movie work. Dalí & Film thus becomes a curious enterprise - one is tempted to call it a celebration of nothingness. Or, if not that, an excuse to contemplate frustration and failure on a grand scale.

"[M]y novel - about a young Bangladeshi woman who exchanges her village home for a flat in the East End of London - has had a far from easy ride in its journey from page to screen.... There were promises of large demonstrations, book burnings and thinly veiled threats of violence." None of which came about. Brick Lane author Monica Ali surveys the damage left by the media looking for a controversy that never was.

The Guardian's Review this week features another writer whose book has just been adapted for the screen. But Neil Gaiman backs way up, offering a brief history of fairy tales before getting to this: "I started writing Stardust in 1994, but mentally timeslipped about 70 years to do it."

Then there's Chris Petit's review of Christopher Sandford's Polanski: "Another reading might have made more of the combination of Jewish chutzpah and Polish melancholy; or the fractured, jet-trash world of European night clubs and international coproduction; or the rivalry with Godard, not just for accepting or refusing to work for Hollywood." Good stuff; the review, that is.

At Flickhead, Steve Fiorilla reviews Joseph Jacoby's Boy on a String: From Cast-off Kid to Filmmaker Through the Magic of Dreams: "Although the Museum of Modern Art held a retrospective of his work in 2006, Jacoby has led a shadowy, quiet career. That most of it’s been spent educating, enlightening and entertaining children reveals a man sensitive to the needs of the human spirit."

"It's marathon season in New York, and I'm delighted to announce that a panel of limber readers... have agreed to join me in going the distance with Tolstoy's War and Peace, all 1200-plus pages in the new translation, by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, which we'll be reading and discussing during the next four weeks," announces Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus. "Why War and Peace? Well, it's one of the greatest novels ever written–the very greatest, some would say. It is, moreover, almost eerie in its timeliness, with its sweeping detailed narrative of military invasion and occupation (by France of Russia in 1812) set against political and social intrigue in Moscow and St Petersburg, as experienced by aristocratic families, some of them in decline."

Update, 10/15: Malcolm Jones has a terrific piece in the new Newsweek on the new translation of War and Peace.

Posted by dwhudson at October 13, 2007 3:46 PM