Books, 7/12.

"Initially rejected by several leading publishers, The Leopard went on to become one of the best-selling Italian novels of the 20th century (more than 3.2 million copies sold) and the basis for Luchino Visconti's classic 1963 film," writes Rachel Donadio on the occasion the 50th anniversary of a work that is "at once a loving portrait of a vanished society and a critique of its provincialism.... In Italy's postwar intellectual scene, dominated by Marxists after years of Fascism, Lampedusa's novel was at first seen as quaint and reactionary, a baroque throwback at the height of neorealism in cinema and class-consciousness in all the arts.... The novelist Alberto Moravia thought the novel 'right wing,' and others found fault with its pessimism. Italian Marxists denounced 'its apparent denial of progress,' as [Lampedusa biographer David] Gilmour put it, though the French Marxist writer Louis Aragon disagreed, calling it a 'merciless' and 'left wing' critique of Lampedusa's own class."

Earlier: Adam Begley on Lampedusa's Sicily; and in Bookforum, Wendy Lesser.

Also in the New York Times Book Review is this week's review of Richard Brody's Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard. "Now we know how one of the greatest of all filmmakers - the man who so radically changed cinema in 1959 with his debut feature, Breathless - became an intolerable gasbag," writes Stephanie Zacharek. "Brody is hardly blind to his subject's foibles: he calls Godard on his flimsier political ideas, particularly his devotion to Maoism (a trend among French intellectuals in the late 60s that Brody identifies, rightly, as thinly veiled fascism) and, later, the anti-Semitism that repeatedly surfaced in his work.... Although Brody repeatedly challenges Godard's limited ideology, he does buy a little too readily into the notion that a work of art informed by political ideas is inherently more meaningful or more interesting than one with, say, a great deal of aesthetic inventiveness or emotional depth."

Here come the warm ICBMs.

Meanwhile, in the Guardian, Hilary Mantel reviews Towards Another Summer: "Its content and imagery show its intimate relation to Janet Frame's three volumes of memoir, which have become widely known through Jane Campion's celebrated film An Angel at My Table. Frame's haunting and powerful trilogy is one of the greatest of autobiographies, an account of the upbringing of a writer who - partly from choice - put on the inmate's smock of a madwoman, and who discovered just in time her real identity as a genius. This is where, it seems, her great work of memory began to take shape: London 1963, the frigid end of winter."

Also, Charlie Higson on Cosmic: "As one would expect from father-of-seven Frank Cottrell Boyce (the award-winning author of Millions and Framed), it's funny and engaging and in the end rather moving (though not in a horrible Hollywood 'what have we learned today, children?' kind of way)."

Posted by dwhudson at July 12, 2008 3:36 PM