Richard Condon’s The Manchurian Candidate is one of the defining Cold War thrillers of American literature. Published in 1959, it captures a world of paranoia, espionage, and ideological extremism at the height of the Red Scare. The novel follows Sergeant Raymond Shaw, a decorated Korean War veteran who, unbeknownst to himself, has been brainwashed by Communist agents into becoming an unwitting assassin. The real tragedy (and brilliance) of Condon’s construction is that Shaw’s mother, Eleanor Iselin, is the true villain: an ambitious, ruthless woman who manipulates both her son and her husband, Senator John Iselin, a demagogic McCarthy caricature, to
Tag: books (Page 3 of 3)
In one of my weekend trips to Philadelphia, I went to the Parkway Central Library to visit Grip. If you are a reader of Charles Dickens or Edgar Allan Poe you may know a thing or two about him. In 1941, Charles Dickens published the novel Barnaby Rudge, which had been serialized in the same year in his own weekly periodical Master Humphrey’s Clock. As a companion to the title character, Dickens added a large and talkative raven called Grip. His idea, expressed in a letter to a friend, was to make the bird “immeasurably more knowing” than the protagonist.
I hadn’t been intrigued about The Epic of Gilgamesh, the ancient epic poem from Mesopotamia, until the coincidence of seeing, only a few weeks apart, this story featured in both a Star Trek episode and a graphic novel by Jim Starlin. In Darmok, the second episode of the fifth season of Star Trek: The Next Generation, first televised in 1991, Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart) gets stranded on a planet with Dathon (Paul Winfield), a Tamarian captain. They have trouble communicating with each other because the Tamarian language is based on references to their history and mythology in an allegorical format
Crimes from pulp fiction books reenacted by a real murderer. A locked-room mystery disrupting a conference about Edgar Allan Poe. Members of a gastronomy club being killed one by one right after having their favorite dishes. These are just a few of the plots from L.F. Veríssimo’s novels. But what really makes them interesting to me are their narrative structures and the cultural artifacts that fuel them. Luis Fernando Veríssimo, one of the most celebrated and prolific Brazilian writers, is mostly known for his hundreds of humorous short stories and newspaper columns, collected in dozens of books starting in 1973.
My latest movie marathon was all about The Lost World. First I read the original novel by Conan Doyle (yes, the same guy who created Sherlock Holmes) and then watched six adaptations for the screen. At the end of the 19th century, Sir H. Rider Haggard was the king of stories about lost worlds, with books like The People of the Mist (about a lost tribe in Africa) and Heart of the World (about a lost Mayan city in Mexico). But the genre got it’s masterpiece in 1912, when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle unleashed The Lost World. Explorers venturing to