Stranger on Earth

After the thought-provoking 21 Grams (2003) and Babel (2006), film aficionados everywhere have come to expect nothing less than brilliant from Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu. Biutiful (2010, Oscar noms for Best Actor and Best Foreign Film) is exactly the socio-political yet (uncomfortably) intimate portrait we waited for. Not much needs to be said about Javier Bardem’s performance as the anguished father burdened with a manic-depressive, nympho ex-wife, two young children, and a whole slew of other personal demons. Film critics have extensively dealt with it, and besides, when was the last time anyone saw Bardem act below par? Bardem’s character Uxbal is complex, replete with all the human flaws and frailties you can fathom, and as irony would have it, he is also being incapacitated by prostate cancer and is due to expire in months. This leaves him with a dirty conscience which he is desperate to scrub clean before his time comes. He attempts to reconcile with h...

Edward Morgan Forster penned Maurice (1913) at a time when homosexuality was a punishable crime and generally viewed as an abomination in the UK. The intervening years have been relatively kind to this persuasion, with the softening of laws on homosexual behaviour in Wales and England in the late 1960s, which led to the publication of the novel in 1971, the year after its author’s death. New readers of Maurice are often surprised by two factors: (1) the tenderness every page exudes, and (2) the uncharacteristic happy-ever-after ending. It is also for these reasons that the novel was dismissed by eminent critics upon publication. It was somehow deemed unrealistic that the novel’s homosexual characters should go on to lead a life that even heterosexuals dared not dream of. Several decades later, with our understanding of homosexual life having evolved to a more sophisticated level, we know better. We now see that what Forster proposes in Maurice is anything but a sentimental fant...

An allegory? A Moby Dick imitation? A morality tale? A (semi-)autobiographical account? How should Ernest Hemingway’s signature work The Old Man and the Sea (1952) be read? One fact is carved in stone. The work has a gargantuan reputation, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1953, and reminding the Nobel Prize committee that acknowledgement of Hemingway’s genius had been long overdue. Readers come to the novella with certain expectations, and usually leave slightly puzzled, unsure of its “message” and yet utterly convinced of the power of its composition. The novella showcases Hemingway’s laconic prose style at its most sophisticated. It contains only bare bones, devoid of longwinded character and setting descriptions. The reader is given little, and must therefore work twice as hard to steer through Hemingway’s “cruel sea.” Ostensibly, the novella is about an aged, down-and-out fisherman who has to fish alone and finds himself entangled in a body and mind battle with a giant marli...

In my book there are two kinds of writers: the kind that produces record-breakers in publishing history, and the kind that tinkers away in quietude, far away from the limelight, the award shows, and public adulation.  Generalisations are unavoidable in the categorising of writers. The first kind is rarely preoccupied with aesthetic matters or ideological revolutions, preferring to do it “straight” to widen public appeal. His aim is to entertain (a filthy, filthy word in Literature) and to thrill the reader, to provide – here comes another scatological term – escapism(!) from the awful ordinariness of everyday life. The second kind is rarely aware of the reader’s needs and wants. He is more interested in his own thought process, the “sound” of the authorial voice, and the mechanics of writing. The reader is an afterthought to him. Every aspiring writer must at one point arrive at this crossroads and wonder which way to turn.  Either direction poses a series of...

From The New York Times July 4, 2012 To Use and Use Not By  JULIE BOSMAN In an interview in The Paris Review in 1958 Ernest Hemingway made an admission that has inspired frustrated novelists ever since: The final words of “A Farewell to Arms,” his wartime masterpiece, were rewritten “39 times before I was satisfied.” Those endings have become part of literary lore, but they have never been published together in their entirety, according to his longtime publisher, Scribner. A new edition of “A Farewell to Arms,” which was originally published in 1929, will be released next week, including all the alternate endings, along with early drafts of other passages in the book. The new edition is the result of an agreement between Hemingway’s estate and Scribner, now an imprint of Simon & Schuster. It is also an attempt to redirect some of the attention paid in recent years to Hemingway’s swashbuckling, hard-drinking image — through fictional depictions in the best-se...

The traditional reading of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) is that of the Icarus legend: fly too high and too close to the sun, you will lose your wings and plunge to your death. Victor Frankenstein’s attempt to play God gives birth to a “monster” that will stop at nothing to destroy his loved ones. Its hideousness is an affront to civilised society and to godliness. Shelley’s novel does indeed lend itself fully to this reading, but a contemporary reading, one that bears in mind Man’s alienation in modern times, can reveal a new element or two. Doctor Frankenstein is referred to as “the Creator” on numerous occasions. His intellectual pursuit is entirely of a divine nature, as is evidenced in the following passage: It was the secrets of heaven and earth that I desired to learn; and whether it was the outward substance of things, or the inner spirit of nature and the mysterious soul of man that occupied me, still my enquiries were directed to the metaphysical, o...

On May 10th of 1934, a month after the publication of his new novel, Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote to his friend, Ernest Hemingway, and asked for his honest opinion on the book — a tale about Dick and Nicole Diver, a couple based largely on mutual acquaintances of both Fitzgerald and Hemingway: Gerald and Sara Murphy. Hemingway certainly responded with honesty. His engrossing reply — a letter that contains plenty of advice for any writer — can be read below. (Note: Hemingway's spelling is shown accurately. For example, he twice wrote "write" where, presumably, he meant "right.") ( Source: Ernest Hemingway Selected Letters 1917-1961; Image: Ernest Hemingway, via. ) Key West 28 May 1934 Dear Scott: I liked it and I didn't. It started off with that marvelous description of Sara and Gerald (goddamn it Dos took it with him so I can't refer to it. So if I make any mistakes—). Then you started fooling with them,...