The Nobel Prize and various and sundry matters
By Jonathan Price
Philip Roth died a month ago. And it is a great loss though little surprise since he was 85 and had intentionally retired from writing six years ago and not given a farewell tour. His prominence is perhaps indicated by several articles the next day in the main section of the New York Times1 marking his death, and a two-day retrospective of his interviews with Terry Gross on Fresh Air2 (culled from seven interviews over the past, say, 25 years).
Who is the genius?
By Jonathan Price
Genius is a movie you’re likely to miss, but shouldn’t. In our little burg it got two stars out of four, an invitation to skip it, and ran for perhaps one week at the local art theatre downtown. It was previewed in advance a number of times, but apparently never made it out of its dim downtown venue, and may have been seen by 300 people – perhaps – in a metropolitan area of one million.
From recent correspondence
Edited by Morris Dean
Didn’t you spend three weeks in Paris last month? Did you see many bees? “Bees Thrive in an Unexpected Paradise: Paris” [Aurelien Breeden, NY Times, May 24]. Excerpt:
The Ungreat Gatsby: A failed attempt to transmit literature to film
By Jonathan Price
Why does anyone want to do yet another film version of one of the great American novels of the twentieth century? The answer, I suppose, is the same as why anyone tries to climb mountains: because they are there. Actually, despite the relatively small fatality rate, there is far more repeat success climbing mountains than there is any significant success turning great literature into even moderately successful or satisfying films. In fact, the effort is littered with the near-dead bodies of failed attempts at great fiction-to-film transformations.
