Bookforum. Dec/Jan 08. (And a bit more on other books, too.)

"While you are reading The Leopard, and particularly while you are rereading it, you are likely to feel that it is one of the greatest novels ever written." So begins Wendy Lesser's fourth paragraph. The first three, by the way, are fantastic. At any rate, The Leopard "is as ephemeral as the state of mind it chronicles, which is, in turn, part of a vanishing civilization, and no amount of nostalgic remembrance or effortful evocation will do it justice. This is partly why the Luchino Visconti movie of the book, beautiful as it is, is such a betrayal: The movie cannot help celebrating in a rather simpleminded way the visual glories of the faded past, whereas [Giuseppe Tomasi di] Lampedusa's skill lies precisely in puncturing those glories with a pinprick of subtle wit."

Also in the new issue of Bookforum, John Banville reads The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps: The Best Crime Stories from the Pulps During Their Golden Age - The 20s, 30s & 40s: "[Raymond] Chandler perhaps labored too long and too hard at effecting the transmutation of life's raw material into deathless prose. A far greater writer, James M Cain, who was happy to keep it raw, who gloried, indeed, in the rebarbative, created a masterpiece, seemingly effortlessly, in The Postman Always Rings Twice.... Crime fiction flourishes in hard times.... At their best, and even, perhaps, at their worst, these yarns express something of the unforgiving harshness and dauntless optimism of life in America in the decades between the wars."

Related: "So what exactly is The Long Embrace?" asks Andy Klein in the LA CityBeat. "[Judith] Freeman lays out her goals in the first chapter: 'I did not want to write a biography of Chandler and his wife. But I did want to write a book about them... I was not looking to create a fictional relationship, and yet I did want to be free to imagine their lives.' That's a fair enough description.... It's the sort of balancing act that Joan Didion - an obvious model - can pull off brilliantly. While Freeman never quite falls off the wire, she also fails in the end to bring together her knowledge of Chandler, her own experience, and her insights into Chandler's work in any sort of revelatory way.

Back to Bookforum: "Fading in with an epigraph from Josef von Sternberg - 'I believe that cinema was here from the beginning of the world' - Steve Erickson adapts nearly the oldest story in the book (Abraham and Isaac), threads it through the projector through which all film history spins, and, having cast a hero who's part Being There's Chance the gardener and part 2001's Starchild (endowed, no less, with an infinite perspective worthy of Borges's Aleph), throws light and shadow onto the backs of our eyelids in this love letter to celluloid," writes Andrew Hultkrans. "The mash-up of cultural references in the preceding sentence gives you an advance sense of Zeroville, a novel that mingles Erickson's own characters with historical figures both real and reel. This conceit will make film geeks like myself weep with joy but may be daunting for those who can't tell Elizabeth Taylor from Natalie Wood - not only by appearance but by what they mean."

Noah Isenberg reviews Foster Hirsch's Otto Preminger: The Man Who Would Be King:

As a director, Preminger will likely be remembered for his most critically acclaimed work (Laura [1944], Angel Face [1952], and Anatomy of a Murder [1959], among others) and, stylistically speaking, for his exquisite long shots and touches of seemingly uncharacteristic subtlety. Yet as "a genius for publicity," as Dwight Macdonald once called him, Preminger will be most remembered for his controversies: as the man who fought back against the Catholic Legion of Decency and defied the Production Code Administration (The Moon Is Blue [1953]); who boldly depicted drug addition (The Man with the Golden Arm [1955]) and homosexuality (Advise & Consent [1962]); who directed - and had an affair with - the first African-American nominee for best actress (Dorothy Dandridge, for Carmen Jones); who held a much-hyped international competition for the role of Joan of Arc, in which Iowan Jean Seberg, of later Breathless fame, rose to the top (Saint Joan [1957]); and who hired, fully credited, the blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo (Exodus [1960]). The portrait that Hirsch paints, showing the director in all of his guises, is appropriately rich in nuance.

"More than a full portrait of the man, [Hollywood's Censor: Joseph I. Breen and the Production Code Administration] is a record of decision making, of rulings and reversals," writes Liz Brown. [Miracles and Sacrilege: Roberto Rossellini, the Church, and Film Censorship in Hollywood], too, is more history than film analysis."

"Declaring the book inert - 'written by a dead man about dead things,' Sartre wrote in 1947, 'it no longer has any place on this earth' - he advised contemporary writers to 'learn to speak in images' and to work for newspapers, radio, and film," notes Sam Stark. "Tamara Chaplin's vivid, thorough, and irreverent cultural history Turning On the Mind: French Philosophers on Television presents this moment and its consequences from an unfashionable point of view, not that of the editors of Tel Quel, but that of a Parisian couch potato.... Most important, she profiles and interviews the people who thought it was a good idea to put philosophy on television: the pompous technocrats, earnest producers, skeptical hosts, and baffled cameramen, as well as the often-inscrutable philosophers."

Plus: Kera Bolonik talks with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie; Peter Brooks and Colm Tóibín on Henry James, Marjorie Perloff on John Ashbery, Morris Dickstein and Lewis Dabney on Edmund Wilson, Albert Mobilio on Edward Burtynsky and, of course, much more.

"This is a legacy-burnishing project, plain and simple," writes David Kamp, reviewing Eric Lax's Conversations With Woody Allen for the New York Times Book Review before eventually moving on to Woody Allen's own Mere Anarchy and The Insanity Defense: The Complete Prose:

Conversations reveals, happily, an Allen who's game to range freely over his oeuvre. We learn that his favorites of his own films are The Purple Rose of Cairo, Match Point and Husbands and Wives (the last one a bit of a surprise), with Stardust Memories and Zelig ranking a notch below. Sometimes Allen's assessments are bracingly contrarian. He expresses bafflement over the high regard in which Annie Hall and Manhattan continue to be held ("People really latched on to Manhattan in a way that I thought was irrational," he says) and makes a strong case for Manhattan Murder Mystery, his underappreciated 1993 reunion picture with Diane Keaton. In other moments, no less fascinating, he borders on the delusional. He can't fathom, for example, how Hollywood Ending, a patchy, forgettable effort from 2002, "was not thought of as a first-rate, extraordinary comedy."

Bob Balaban "has spent much of his five-decade film career playing unassuming nebbishes who seem to feel mildly embarrassed that someone has shooed them in front of a movie camera. But if anyone was born to be a star, it's Balaban: his family owned and operated an impressive empire of movie studios, including a number of legendary cinemas in his native Chicago, and his uncle Barney was the president of Paramount Pictures for almost thirty years." And now, on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Nerve's Leonard Pierce talks with Balaban about his book, Spielberg, Truffaut & Me: An Actor's Journey.

Posted by dwhudson at November 16, 2007 4:30 PM