SHORT STORY ADAPTATIONS: this month, Dr. CHRIS MACHELL looks at decaying masculinity in John Cheever’s ‘The Swimmer’: ‘The Swimmer is as much as an attack on the self-involved counter-culturalism of Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation as it is on self-satisfied wealthy suburbia…’
SHORT STORY ADAPTATIONS: this month, Dr. CHRIS MACHELL takes us back to the post-war film noir of Graham Greene’s ‘The Basement Room’: ‘One might expect the perspective shifts to dilute the effect of an unreliable narrator, but the result is actually the opposite, confusing the objective truth of the story’s event with the subjective perspectives of the characters…’
SHORT STORY ADAPTATIONS: this month, Dr. CHRIS MACHELL takes us to war-time Shanghai for a closer look at Eileen Chang’s story, ‘Lust, Caution’: ‘Chang’s prose is direct and efficient, yet evokes well-springs of emotion, historical trauma, and shared cultural memory…’
SHORT STORY ADAPTATIONS: this month, Dr. CHRIS MACHELL looks at the limitations of film in the adaptation of Steven Millhauser’s Eisenheim the Illusionist: ‘Working in the ‘dark realm of transgressions’, Millhauser’s Eisenheim undermines the distinction between reality and illusion…’
