This
1890 novel, also calledThe Beast in Man, may be the most intense among the twenty novels that comprise
Zola’s cycle about the fortunes and vicissitudes of the Rougon-Macquart, a
fictional clan. Its complex plot is set in the railroad milieu and
involves homicidal mania, seduction, adultery, murder, social hypocrisy, and a harrowing
train wreck.
Zola’s novels were controversial at his time, not
least because of his indictments of social, political, economic, and class issues,
but now stand as magnificent achievements in literary realism. Equally powerful
is Zola’s "You Are There!" manner of storytelling, which is unsurpassed in
its immediacy. A case in point is this novel’s unforgettable ending.
His haunting, impressionistic study of a man's slow corruption by jealousy, Emile Zola's The Beast Within (La Bete Humaine) is translated from the French with an introduction and notes by Roger Whitehouse in Penguin Classics.
Roubaud is consumed by a jealous rage when he discovers a sordid secret about his young wife's past. The only way he can rest is by forcing her to help him murder the man involved, but there is a witness - Jacques Lantier, a fellow railway employee. Jacques, meanwhile, must contend with his own terrible impulses, for every time he sees a woman he feels…
John Fowles’s 1969 novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman is famous for its two endings, but this Grand Master from the Golden Age of mystery fiction was there thirty-two years earlier. Carr specialized in impossible crimes of the locked-room variety, although he expanded the concept considerably.
The Burning Court cleverly combines a fictional contemporary murder plot with a sensational true case from seventeenth-century France in a way as intellectually daring as it is macabre — and utterly unexpected.
I began reading Carr as a teenager and have been re-reading him out of sheer fascination with (read: addiction to) his ingenuity. I first read The Burning Court decades ago and still remember my shock when I inadvertently looked at the second ending before finishing the first.
While researching a book on nineteenth-century murders, Edward Stevens is shocked to find a picture of an executed murderess who is identical to his wife
In
the popular imagination, Nero is the "baddest" Roman emperor of all: megalomaniac,
matricide, arsonist, and first persecutor of Christians. The 1951 Hollywood version of Henryk Sienkiewicz’s novel Quo Vadis? summed up the common view: “the Antichrist known to history as the Emperor Nero.”
Historians
have voiced doubts, but prejudices are virtually ineradicable. Drinkwater scrupulously
examines all the ancient sources, proving that the historical record does not support
the Christians’ view of Nero.
But how could anybody have
been fiddling when string instruments were plucked but not played with a bow? Fiddle
derives from the Latin fidiculae, a name for instruments that included the
Greekkithara, which Nero would have used.
This book portrays Nero, not as the murderous tyrant of tradition, but as a young man ever-more reluctant to fulfil his responsibilities as emperor and ever-more anxious to demonstrate his genuine skills as a sportsman and artist. This reluctance caused him to allow others to rule, and rule surprisingly well, in his name. On its own terms, the Neronian empire was in fact remarkably successful. Nero's senior ministers were many and various, but notably they included a number of powerful women, such as his mother, Agrippina II, and his second and third wives, Poppaea Sabina and Statilia Messalina. Using the…
In my book, I present a new approach to the
creative affinities between ancient verbal and modern visual narratives.
I
examine screen adaptations of classical epic, tragedy, comedy, novels, myth,
and history, exploring, for example, how ancient rhetorical principles
regarding emotions and Aristotle’s perspective on thrilling plot turns apply
to film. I interpret several popular films, e.g., 300, and analyze specific
works by international directors, among them Pasolini, Cocteau, von Trier, Ford,
Hitchcock, and Spike Lee.
I hope to demonstrate the undiminished vitality of
classical myth and literature in our visual media, as with screen portrayals of
Helen of Troy.
