nomadreader

The backstory: Outline  is on the 2015 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction longlist. It's also shortlisted for the 2015 Folio Prize . The basics: Outline  is billed as a novel of ten conversations. It begins with Faye, a recently divorced writer with two sons, on a flight from London to Athens, Greece, where she will teach writing. My thoughts: Outline  is very much a novel of ideas. There is no real plot to speak of, and its main character is the titular outline--we get but an outline of her through her interactions with strangers and friends alike. Still, I found it was a more cohesive story than I expected. Because it was billed as a novel of ten conversations, I made the mistaken assumption that these ten conversations would be with ten different people (spoiler: they're not.) While we only see some characters once, other appear several times, which helps ground the narrative and makes it feel more like a novel than a chronological series of short stories. As...

The backstory: Before Midnight  is the third film in what I hope is an ongoing series rather than a trilogy. The first two films, Before Sunrise and Before Sunset  are two of my favorite movies of all time . The basics: We meet Jesse and Celine again, nine years after their poignant walk around Paris, in Greece. Slowly we learn they have been together since that day in Paris and they now have twin daughters. My thoughts: Despite my best efforts, I had high expectations for this film. I have loved Before Sunrise and Before Sunset  for years. And Before Midnight  was getting ridiculoulsy good reviews. Then Peter Travers said " It's damn near perfect. " And Owen Glieberman said it was " enchanting entertainment that's also the most honest and moving film about love in years ." They're both right, but what I wasn't prepared for in this film was how much it hurt to watch. Before Midnight  is so different from the other two films. There are cer...

I was fourteen when I first saw Before Sunrise . I'm pretty sure I saw it more than once in the theater, but I definitely remember it's one of the few films I've owned on VHS, Laserdisc (my family were early adopters), and dvd. It's a film I've loved for years. It's a film I still know most of the lines and facial expressions, even though I had not seen it in at least two years. Yet when I sat down to watch it with my husband Friday night, I was amazed to discover the film resonates more with me now than it ever has. Let me back up. In case you're unfamiliar with this film, it's the story of Jesse, an American, and Celine, a Frenchwoman, who meet on a train. Jesse is heading to Vienna, where he flies out the next morning. Celine is returning to Paris after visiting her grandmother in Hungary. Jesse convinces Celine to get off the train with him in Vienna, and they explore the city and talk all night. This description will likely either make you want to...

The backstory: Fugitive Pieces  won the Orange Prize in 1997. The basics:  My library catalog had a better summary than I could write: "It is the story of World War II as remembered and imagined by one of its survivors: a poet named Jakob Beer, traumatically orphaned as a young child and smuggled out of Poland, first to a Greek island (where he will return as an adult), and later to Toronto. It is the story of how, over his lifetime, Jakob learns the power of language--to destroy, to omit, to obliterate, but also to restore and to conjure, witness and tell--as he comes to understand and experience what was lost to him and of what is possible for him to regain." My thoughts: Fugitive Pieces  is the tale of two reading experiences for me. While I was reading it, I was captivated by the language. It's clear Anne Michaels is a poet: "a place so empty it was not even haunted." (p. 61) I wrote down pages and pages of passages. I would mutter "wow," freq...